Liquid Web · Aug 2013–Dec 2017
This is where support became production operations for me.
I spent more than four years in customer-facing managed hosting, working issues that could cross WordPress, Linux, PHP, web servers, MySQL, DNS, SSL, control panels, security, performance, backups, and the customer's application.
Environment
- Support systems
- Zendesk · Salesforce
- Hosting administration
- cPanel · WHM · Plesk
- Application
- WordPress · Managed WordPress
- Systems
- Linux · PHP · Apache / NGINX · MySQL · DNS / SSL
Heroic Support
The expectation was to own the problem, not just answer the ticket.
Liquid Web's support culture had a name: Heroic Support. Historical company material from the period emphasized earning customer trust, continuing to improve, and treating customer success as a support responsibility. I experienced that as a practical standard: stay responsive, investigate instead of deflecting, explain what you know, and keep working when the first answer is not enough.
That mattered because the customer usually did not care which internal layer technically owned the failure. Their production site was slow, broken, compromised, misconfigured, or unavailable. My job was to make progress without losing the person on the other side of the issue.
What I actually worked across
A hosting ticket could move from application behavior to infrastructure and back again.
- 01Application
WordPress, PHP behavior, plugins, permissions, configuration, runtime errors, and customer-specific application problems.
- 02Hosting
cPanel, WHM, Plesk, Apache or NGINX, MySQL, caching, resource usage, and performance.
- 03Availability
DNS, SSL, connectivity, routing, and the layers that can make a healthy application appear unavailable.
- 04Recovery
Backups, restores, malware/security remediation, and verification after high-impact incidents.
Managed WordPress
I also helped support Liquid Web's Managed WordPress offering.
That work pushed more application knowledge into the hosting-support role. It was not enough to know that the server was up; support also had to understand WordPress behavior, customer workflows, platform expectations, and where a productized hosting layer changed the troubleshooting path.
When repetitive diagnostics kept showing up, I wrote small Bash and Python tools to make those checks faster and more consistent. That habit—fix the immediate problem, then improve the next investigation—followed me into later roles.
What Liquid Web added
Technical depth with a customer waiting for the answer.
Liquid Web gave me years of exposure to real production failures and the discipline to keep technical diagnosis tied to customer impact. It is still the foundation I draw on when a problem crosses layers and nobody has a neat handoff ready.