Peerless WordPress Support.
Busiest month, massive DDoS attack, 2 new teamies.
January saw our busiest month with 656 tickets solved at 100% client satisfaction and with 1399 support interactions. This is in stark contrast to 275 tickets in the same period last year.
WTF?
Well, late on NY eve there was a massive, sustained DDoS attack on one of London’s major data centres, taking down hundreds of millions of web server requests as the centre was flooded from thousands of attack locations across the world.
It was the biggest and most sustained attack we’ve seen in 20 years.
The timing was tough, peaking just before the Big Ben struck midnight on the 31st. We were on hand to help clear up the mess and working through to 6 am to keep clients informed. During an 8 hour period, the attack created around 100 support tickets to and from customers, partners and suppliers.
By midday on New Year’s Day, all sites were back, albeit many operating slowly via temporary fixes, some of which took some days to clear through. Additionally, the holiday season meant that many clients weren’t even around so were unable to respond to warning and communication tickets and that seriously screwed-up our response times.
We typically have response time under 12 hours – but with such a deluge of out of hours and off-season activity, the first response time dropped to 84hrs. I guess the “live by the sword and die by it too” applies when you use response-time as a KPI. We’re sorry for those that missed tickets and the slow response we sometimes showed during the first few days on January.
Normal service is resumed
The blip is over, and we’re back to our normal (super?) level of responsiveness
New teamies
Two new super-heroes joined support at the start of January, say hello to Dave and Sam. They bring an increasingly widening of our skill set in support. Sam is a server and infrastructure wizard and is working on rolling all our support clients onto a GitHub framework in the first quarter. Dave brings seven years WordPress experience plus heavy-weight PHP coding skills.
Support is now made up of Aaron, Al, Dave, Jimmy, Matthew, Sam, Shannon and Tom. The team is sure getting big!
