Migrations — it can be a dreaded word for both you and us, but in reality, migrations are in everybody’s best interest. Right now we’re working on a migration from our last control panel, Plesk, to cPanel. We’ve decided that cPanel is the best platform we can offer you, as a user of our services, because it’s robust and it offers a ton of new things for you to use. At first the interface might seem a little confusing, but after a little rooting around we’re sure you’ll get the hang of it quickly.

In this current set of migrations, we’re not going to be mass moving a ton of accounts at a time, but rather, we’ll be moving small batches day by day until the task is complete. This ensures that we can double check each account to make sure it’s working perfectly before we consider the move done. Granted, sometimes little details might not be exactly right; because you’re being moved to a newer server, sometimes it means that applications like PHP will have gotten a face-lift. So occasionally you might find you need to make a tweak here and there to your site’s code, but hey, it’s a pretty small price to pay for a shiny new set of stuff, don’t you think?

If you ever find yourself getting lost around cPanel, or can’t figure out how to make something work, remember it’s ok to drop us a line at any time of day. But hey, that’s what your friendly neighborhood support department is for!

Dennis

The WingSix office is located right in the heart of Chicago — Tuan captured the spirit of this with the Chicago skyline imprinted into the current theme for our blog, as you can see.  Our offices are located just about a block away from the magnificent Sears Tower.  Being in a hustling and bustling city can sometimes have its advantages when it comes to fun things.  For the past few days, we’ve noticed a bunch of pink signs plastered all over signposts and such, with the big bold letters: RFK.

We’ve recently discovered that RFK stands for “Rory’s First Kiss,” which is actually the code name for the movie The Dark Knight.  Which means…that the new Batman movie is being filmed nearby!  How incredible is that?  While we don’t know any people directly involved in the movie, it looks like certain parts are being filmed on Wacker Drive as well as LaSalle Avenue right by our building.  Friends in other nearby offices report office memos being distributed to notify workers about the production of “Rory’s First Kiss” and how it might affect the commute.  Imagine that.

When the movie comes out, we bet you’ll be able to see Chicago as a character in and of itself in the background, masquerading as Gotham City.  And if you stretch your imagination even further, maybe you’ll remember your WingSix crew when you see the movie some time next year.  Not that any of us are caped crusaders at night.  Or are we!?  You’ll never really know.

As you can all see, our website has undergone a massive makeover. This was a huge undertaking by both our web design team as well as our staff here, but we hope you like the change. It’s a lot like one of those new wrappers you see on your favorite soda — “New Look, Same Great Taste!” But you know what we’re saying.

This blog has also gotten a playful and interesting skin as well, done by Tuan Bui at Lithe Giant. Tuan does higher-end web design, and you can visit him at http://www.lithegiant.com.

We hope you like the new look. As always, we’ve got more things in the pipeline for you, so don’t worry. Good things are coming.

The WingSix Staff

One of the difficulties of doing what we do for you is that the Internet (yes, with a capital I), is a very volatile place. It’s kind of like a sea of electronic requests for information, constantly. You have to imagine that being an administrator for your services can be a difficult job sometimes, but it’s really about being flexible. For us, I would say it is very difficult to predict when our webservers will be flooded with spam, portscanned, or if one lucky website gets written up somewhere and becomes quite popular. And that’s only just a small part of the equation too. Think about hardware failures, network outages (when network equipment that allows you to talk to the server go down), ISP issues, and local computer problems, software glitches…the list goes on and on!

Nobody likes to see problems in their service, least of all us. Most of our staff is on call, 24 x 7, through holidays and during the times we so desperately need sleep. We’ve been woken up at pretty crazy times, let me tell you. Our eyes are on our monitoring systems, our ears are to the ground, and even then, we really don’t know what may happen next. I know how much your website means to you, whether it’s family photo galleries, your online business presence that brings in that much needed income, a way to keep in touch with friends, and however you use your webhosting. But you know what? This is why we keep going. It might sound cheesy, but this is our way of life. We’re always wired, always in touch, and ready to do our best in keeping your webhosting right where you need it: up and running.

This might seem like a strange analogy to some of you, but being your support representative is like boating. The goal is to always stay afloat, even though the dynamics of the environment can change from one moment to the next (like our Chicago weather too…). Storms and waves might come, but even after a crashing cascade of water, we always stay on top of the situation. Or try our best, at least — we’re only human. Sometimes our ships can take on a bit of water, but that’s all part of the struggle of keeping up with the fluid dynamics of what we do.

Dennis

I was hired here at WingSix just over one year ago. It was my first opportunity in the web hosting business and in the technology industry in general. Throughout the course of my first year I have learned an awful lot about this business and what it means to be a good tech support representative.

Everyone has had one of those bad tech support experiences at some point. Waiting on hold for endless hours, the impossible to navigate phone tree that doesn’t ever seem to lead you to an actual person to talk to, the know-it-all support representative that doesn’t really know anything at all, who may even be rude and impatient too, not to mention having your call transferred multiple times while having to wait on hold at each step along the way. These experiences can be incredibly frustrating and demoralizing, and can even make you want to take your business somewhere else.

We’ve all been there. At WingSix, though, we try to do things a little differently. I learned very quickly that we have an entirely different standard when it comes to the level of support that we offer here. We want you to be able to get ahold of someone to help you right now, not after you hold for 20 minutes. We want to have the type of techs that can solve your problems, and answer your questions the first time, without having to send you around to four different people first. If the problem requires followup, we want to make sure to do so as expeditiously as possible. And above all else, we want to treat our customers with the respect and consideration that they deserve.

I may have spoken with you at some point over the last year when you were having some trouble with your account. If so, I hope that I was able to not only help you with your problem, but to do so in a way that lived up to the standards that we try to uphold here at WingSix. If not, then rest assured that all of us here constantly strive to be the kind of support techs that can consistantly provide you with the best kind of support experience possible. We feel that this dedication to excellent support is what sets us apart from other web hosting companies out there, and we hope to keep living up to those lofty standards.

Aaron

As my first Blog post I want to focus on a general idea of how many web hosting companies forget to focus on what their primary goal is. In our business, the primary goal is to sell web hosting. Its rather a simple idea. In many cases web hosting companies lose focus. They add many other products, or clutter their website, and or send very different messages and then lose track. The most successful web hosting companies have achieved success because they stay on task.

It’s funny, because a couple years back you saw a lot of companies adding flash headers, and tons of graphical movement into there site. All very good looking, though all it does is take away from the sale. In all my years of doing this, most of the biggest web hosting companies have somewhat awful websites, but even with that they never lose site of their primary goal, and in turn these companies are where they are for a reason.

Here is a formula that has worked in most successful businesses:

First, find your Primary Goal. We will use web hosting in this case for example. So selling web hosting is our primary goal.

Second, figure out everything that would lead into achieving this product. In our case we’ve broken down everything that goes into selling web hosting. Whether that be our product line, our support staff, our affiliate program or anything else.

Third, section off items into the different categories of what they focus in. By doing this it will help keep your business sectioned into front end and back end.

Finally, see how everything flows into your primary goal.

The end result of this is that every aspect of your business effects how you achieve your primary goal. If you have a bad support department, that will effect how your primary goal is. If you product lines are out dated, then that will also effect your primary goal.

The first and most important thing in any business model is to figure out what your primary goal is, then the rest usually comes easier.

Joe

Hi. My name is Dennis. If you’ve ever called us for assistance, there’s a very good chance you’ve spoken to me on the telephone. I’ve worked at this company for some years now, and for as long as I’ve been here, I’ve been a part of the support department. Whenever you imagine a support call center, what do you usually think of? For me, just like anybody else, I imagine phone calls funnelling into a drab looking office space full of bored staff members wearing headsets. Here, things are different. All of the staff members are lively, and spend a lot of time joking about a lot of things or talking about daily life whenever we get the chance. Ok, ok, we might wear headsets (Ever get a purple ear from half an hour on a handset? Not fun!), and we might have cubicles and such, but everybody here has great enthusiasm. The bottom line is that we have fun and we love what we do.

When I think about what our support department does for you, sometimes the idea is a little overwhelming. We know that you call us because you’ve got a concern of some kind, which we understand — you don’t call us to let us know everything is running perfectly (otherwise we’d be out of jobs!). We also know that you have every reason to be upset if something mission critical isn’t going your way. I’ve had bad personal experiences calling into other support centers, as we all have, I’m sure. So when we receive a call from you and you’re upset that you can’t get your email set up properly, we feel your stress. Remember, we’re people too. We’re good at what we do because we know exactly how you feel!

One of the interesting things about being here is that we’re not a giant juggernaut company, whose reps may cycle in and out of the job quickly. Our support team is great because we piggyback off of every member’s knowledge — a lot of us are good at different technical issues, which makes the overall team quite flexible. And our approach is different. Rather than reading questions off a script, we make sure each representative is educated by experience, so that whenever he or she receives a phone call, we can all take a freestyle approach to identify and solve the issue at hand. Big companies just don’t run like that. When you hear us typing away rapidly, it’s because we’re pinpointing the source of your concerns and doing our best to zap them away for you.

So if you ever picture us, that’s what we do. I hope that gives you a better insight into our approach to support, and us.

Dennis