Good service shouldn't necessitate support

There’s a difference between a service coming with excellent support and a service with excellent support that you rarely have to access. The latter would be any service where issues can be resolved by the user’s own agency when they do arise. The former would be any service that requires the user to rely on the agency of someone else while issues arise frequently. And no matter how excellent and prompt the support system itself is, a service that requires me to use it often might as well be lousy itself and not have any support.

This little rant comes on the back of my attempt to move a domain I own from WordPress.com to Hover. I jumped through all the hoops. The final step was to click ‘Accept transfer’ on the WP dashboard, and I did – only to get this message: “Oops! Something went wrong and your request could not be processed. Please try again or Contact Support if you continue to have trouble.”

This isn’t an isolated event. Ever since WordPress split its admin area into wp-admin and My Sites around 2014, the My Sites area has been maddening. For example, consider the premium service tiers offered in the My Sites area. Say I’m on the ‘Standard’ plan, purchased for $36/yr. It comes with a free custom domain, so I purchase example.com for $18. Next, I’d like to try the $99/yr ‘Premium’ plan, which also comes with a custom domain as well as from a 30-day money-back guarantee. So I pay $63 ($99 minus $36), play around with it for a bit, then decide to cancel the plan and get my money back – like I’m supposed to. But when I click ‘Cancel & refund’, I’m told I’ll receive $45 back and not $63 because oh-so-considerate WordPress would like to leave my domain in so access to my blog isn’t disrupted. However, I haven’t claimed the domain on the ‘Premium’ plan and my existing domain was claimed on the ‘Standard’ plan. What do I do?

If you’d like to cancel your subscription and domain and ask for a full refund, contact support.

Fuck you, WordPress.