Amongst my other jobs, I am the Editor of the holiday cottage review website, MyCottageHoliday.co.uk. If I tell you that VisitBritain call it the “TripAdvisor of self-catering” you’ll get the idea. It’s a small but growing site hosted on a 1and1 cloud server.

A few days ago the site was in trouble – it was timing out and appeared to users to be down. The problem was intermittent but cleared when the server was rebooted. We’ve been adding a lot of new functionality (much of it in the back-end) to improve site search results for users and to allow us to provide owners with far better stats (this with a view to adding a premium, paid service on top of the existing free service).

The problem was so bad that the tech guys couldn’t even get onto the control panel to see where the problem was in the log files. It turned out to be an SQL database issue where some routines were getting into a loop and jamming up the entire server. But that’s not the issue that really struck me the day we fixed the problem.

The 1and1 dedicated server support guy – a man in the US called Marc – was superb. I don’t just mean that he helped us sort out the issue, which he did, but also in the way he managed to calm everyone down. At one point I apologised for chewing up his time and putting him below his call rate stats. “I don’t even know if we have a call target” he told me. “If I sort out the issue first time, you won’t need to call back – which suits everyone”. Interesting! So we carried on in this manner for over an hour. In the long pauses whilst he accessed the server, painful step by step, I mentioned that he sounded a bit like Stephen Wright, the dry American comedian (if you don’t know him – you should give him a try). Without a pause, back at me came a classic SW gag delivered in voice that could have been the man. “I spilled spot remover on my dog” he told me. “Now he’s gone”.

It was a change of pace and a breaking of the tension that was comedically worthy of Stephen Wright himself. I couldn’t help but quote back my favourite, “I bought some powdered water, but I don’t know what to add”. Couldn’t do the voice though.

It turned out that not only was he a good mimic with superb comedy timing (and a voice over artist in the US it turns out), but he was a superb server tech head. If only all customer services departments could deliver this level of support. Server disaster turned into object lesson in customer support. Superb.