Siteground Drops A Bombshell
In early October 2020, Siteground dropped a bombshell with its customers (changing policy during their non-refundable annual or multi-year Siteground subscriptions) by a change to their Terms of Service, effectively stopping ANY Siteground support help with WordPress-related problems:
This immediately triggered a firestorm of anger in relevant Facebook Groups – like this WordPress Hosting-dedicated one with over 15,000 members – along the lines of:
In that same Facebook thread with close to 100 comments, a Siteground representative justified the support policy change (this is a private group on Facebook so you need to apply to see the full discussion there) like this:
and while many were angered by this change of policy, others supported their move:
This change also follows from a support policy shift earlier in 2020 where customers seen to be overusing Siteground support were automatically banned from live chat:
And the fact that if you want malware removed from your site, Siteground encourages you to get a $200 a year Sucuri subscription through their affiliate link (WPX does this for free for all customers):
Why WPX Will NEVER Adopt That Siteground Policy
While every organization should do what it thinks is best for them, here is why WPX will NEVER follow that Siteground support direction:
1. Firstly, we understand very well that our core audience is the non-technical solopreneur/digital agency type customer who loves how much we manage for them so that they can get on with running their business instead of managing a Web server.
That’s why we are ranked as the #2 most trusted Web host of all such companies listed on Trustpilot:
2. Part of the whole reason I co-founded WPX in the first place back in 2013 was my utter despair with the terrible customer support of all existing hosting companies back then and for the decades before that.
I wrote about it here.
In fact, a few years back, we introduced our Fixed For You Free Guarantee where we would get any customer’s offline site back online ASAP for free, regardless of the technical nature of the problem, be it WordPress or any other kind of problem.
It’s also why we overloaded WPX Support resources to reach an AVERAGE of 27 seconds or less live chat response time, something proven by the independent metrics of the live chat software we use (and that’s by an agent who can usually solve most problems themselves without escalation):
In short, yes, like SiteGround, we spend a lot of time troubleshooting software conflicts and resolving problems for our customers that are not directly WordPress-related (e.g. SSL certificates) BUT isn’t that what good hosts should be doing?
As I say to our team often at WPX, we are not in the Technology business, we are in the Customer Experience business and that is why we will NEVER stop solving WordPress issues that we can resolve for our customers, for free.
