Michael Arrington says the single hardest thing about running Techcrunch is keeping the site live. Some weeks more hours are spent on the site's infrastructure than its content. But thank god for Media Temple - and for Chris Lea for getting out of bed at 4am to get stuff fixed.
Dennis Howlett says he, like Mike, has had difficulties with the new version of Wordpress. Most hosting providers won't have anything to do with third party apps, but Chris is helping Mike out. Of course, Techcruch does have 189K RSS subscribers, not to mention millions of monthly visitors - many, many of whom are developers. Still, Mike's Media Temple experience made me think of RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady's recent post on "triangulating for success".
Stephen points out that PR/marketing is not about reaching prospects as separate individuals. When someone hears about your product or service from a single source (especially if it's you - but even if it's someone they know and trust), it probably won't have much impact. "But the second notice, from a trusted party, triggers a little click of recognition, and is far more likely to register. Further mentions only escalate this, until the interest to skepticism ratio tilts in favor of a trial."
What this mean, Stephen says, is what you already know: every user counts. Anyone - not just prominent influencers like Mike - can have an impact on adoption. Have you triangulated your way to any new business lately? Chris has. Rackspace is a winner as well. Not one but two happy customers commented on Mike's post that they love being able to reach specialists - people who know and care - instead of someone who isn't empowered to help. I'm sure word on the street was one of the reasons why they were able to sign up 1,092 new customers last quarter. So think twice before you feed customers that "unsupported" line!
PS - If you need help identifying potential influencers, maybe RedMonk can help. James Governor's "distribution first, dollars second" pitch is mainly directed at the IBMs and Suns of the world ("Why not give some zSeries mainframe capacity to Linden Labs, say, but before it got famous?"). But I think his message is equally applicable to The Planet, say, or Verio. He says you need to "capture the customer at the point of desire, but then charge them at the point of value." Doesn't that make sense?
Techcrunch is probably Media Temple's most influential customer - but I doubt it's the largest in terms of revenue or server count. As a vendor, it's easy to track customer size, but much harder to gauge their influence. Even if a guy has 8 RSS subs, you never know what else he might be up to.
Real example: during my EV1 days, I came across a number of customers who were rock stars in their realms. I found out how cool they were only after getting a bunch of referrals. They themselves had low end servers and hardly any bandwidth usage. Who would have thought?
Any way, back to Chris Lea. Does he get out of bed at 4am for every customer? I hope not! But as an in the Web 2.0 loop kind of guy, I know that "unsupported" is NOT his default response.
Agree with your previous comment. Most late nights our teams put in for customers happen without much fanfare. But when they speak highly of our service or we see referrals come in; it makes our day.