Teaching A Dog New Tricks

I’ve never really liked that old adage of “teaching a dog new tricks”. I firmly believe that you have to learn to adapt and grow.
Launching a new product or service is a learning process. I could shove in another saying there about mice and men, but that might be overkill.
Earlier this week we launched the first phase of our new hosting services. In the first phase we introduced VPS hosting using Parallels.
The first thing we discovered was that our new VPS site was full of silly little bugs, with some links pointing to the wrong places completely, and some really odd display issues on some browsers – notably Safari. Even though I use a Mac I always use Firefox out of habit.
Thankfully people were really helpful and not only let us know what issues they’d experienced, but also pointed us in the right direction to fix them!
We also realised very quickly that we weren’t really selling the products properly.
Sure, you could buy the product you wanted, but it wasn’t as easy as it should have been, as we’d linked to the wrong pages from the site’s main page. While this still isn’t exactly the way we’d like it to be we’re working on it behind the scenes
Based on feedback on my previous post about the VPS launch and the numerous emails both I and other members of our team received this week we’ve been working on a few things.
In the first instance we’re adding more linux distributions into the mix.
The first one to be added is Debian, as so many people were asking for it. We’ve added that to the plans without Plesk (control panel)
We’ll also be adding OpenSuse and Ubuntu, though I’m not 100% sure when yet!
There are two other things that we need to work on over the coming days and weeks, apart from the order process itself, and that is building up the documentation on the site, so that users can find the information they need easily, while the other is working on case scenarios.
People were very quick to point out that while my post included a couple of usage scenarios that they could relate to the site itself didn’t.
In the words of Homer Simpson – doh!
So if you have any feedback please do share it. We take it all onboard and will do our best to implement changes based on what you, our clients, tell us that we’re doing wrong – though it’s also nice when you tell us we’re doing something right too!