I really can't tell what exactly you're alluding to.
But that's just my read of the comment.
Edit: Oh, and pitchforks. 80% of the Reddit demographic keeps a pitchfork in their closets for internet mobs.
But I'm taking people's advice - I will now look into paying over $10-15 per month - I don't want to risk something like this again.
I think a vendor fighting someone who is disputing a $3 charge is the height of irrationality. It's going to cost you way more than $3 to just deal with the dispute, so even if you "win" you lose, and worse, then the customer is angry and might get you a lot of bad publicity.
This is so true. Whenever I have a sale of one of my apps and lower the price to $1.99 or something in that range I'm tempted to disable my support mail account.
Cheap people tend to get a huge sense of entitlement when they pay you one or two bucks.
THIS IS PROVIDED WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY AND NO SUPPORT WILL BE GIVEN.
And don't hide that inside 1, 2 or 50 pages of text of course. Then it's all fine. If you don't, then support is going to be expected, no matter the price and that makes complete sense to me.
2.) Customer informed and appropriate action taken for unpaid accounts (suspend account for non-payment)
3.) Customer's friend makes a public complaint on Twitter
4.) Web host responds badly (but perhaps with some justification, outside parties getting involved in disputes, where a simple pay-the-outstanding-invoice would have resolved the situation)
5.) Non-payee gets abusive
6.) Web host deletes the account for abusive behaviour.
Apart from point 3, everything else seems in order. The customer's friend was provoking a reaction in public. What did he want, the webhost to publicly state that his friend's account had been suspended for non-payment? That seems worse than a firm private message to butt out of a contractual matter.
Suspending the customer's friend does seem harsh, but taken from the view that he's complaining publicly about a problem that doesn't involve him, it might be a long term justification of ejecting bad customers instead of just tolerating them (perhaps there's more to the story). That sort of approach is recommended by things like The 4-hour work week, firing your worst customers.
The guy should have paid his bill, either on time, or as soon as justified. There was no reason for his friend to escalate matters, there was no reason for the non-payee to escalate matters. You pay for the service, you get the service. You don't pay, then you get no service. Yes, the web host can be more lenient, but it's not something you should feel entitled to.
There are a number of extenuating circumstances that can warrant or could result in one or more of these points being appropriate responses.
And look at it, it's a cpanel / shared-hosting reseller - those margins are razor thin to non-existent, even loss-leading. If you're not paying at least $7 a month for a cpanel account, then expecting the host to be lenient for non-payment and subsequent abuse from the non-payee is unjustified.
Okay - but removing all of his backups? That's just petty and vindictive. There is zero justification for that.
http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/jk195/stay_the_f...
#6a) Hosting provider deletes the backups as well.
This seems to be about a web host not accepting people not paying their bills.
It's not really the web hosts problem if you can't pay, doesn't matter if you've a dispute with paypal. Don't pay and they're in their rights to cease providing service.
Don't pay, then bitch about them not providing your service, then provide profane public responses and post a call on Reddit to try and get the company destroyed ... well is it a surprise that they delete your data at that point.
Aside: berfarah needs to read up on the Gunpowder Plot.
He explains that there was a valid reason for not being able to pay the bills (I.E. PayPal having a problem). This* then suspended all of his accounts (Including the ones that had already been payed for) and, from the looks of it, were very unhelpful in resolving the situation.
Yes, if the PayPal payment didn't come through the domains should probably have been suspended as they hadn't been payed for, but not the entire account and certainly not denying access to backups
It's an excuse, but it's not payment. Continuation of the contract would presumably require payment. A clients inability to pay ends their right to receive service.
Sure a larger company can usually manage to give grace in such situations (but often won't) but small businesses, as this appears to be, seem to suffer a lot more with cash flow problems.
So the story goes:
1. customer doesn't pay
2. customer and friend argue that not paying shouldn't get their account suspended
3. customers friend tells company to FOAD (or whatever)
4. company terminates all services
5. customer and friend start internet campaign
I'm really struggling to see how the company are supposed to have acted so badly - is it really considered such a crime to not let people have service without rendering payment?
Of course, as ever, there's a lack of detail as to the amounts left unpaid and the nature of the PayPal issue and so none of us should really be offering ludicrously emotional and dramatic judgements about either party.
Edit: I can't believe I had to spell that out for you...
If you still think that this* is somehow justified in any way, read their twitter feed. This isn't the only time a customer has been treated like crap by this*.
Can you point out the bit in the Twitter feeds where we become privy your supposed fact that any service was terminated that was in good standing.
Basically you're saying that the web host maliciously shut down the account without any cause. Can you quote me the bit in the Twitter feed that proves this.
I've fixed problems like this before -- payments not forthcoming for whatever reason -- by simply moving the end date up appropriately. Voila! The customer is paid up for the new thing, and they now have months to figure out the PayPal thing.
I've kicked them to the curb as soon as possible, but not before sending them their source code (at least up until the last commit paid for), server passwords, backups, assets, and whatever else I can find.
I've never, ever, deleted anything or brought a server down just because I was angry at them. And thank goodness too, because half of the time they come back after they've had a chance to cool off.
Telling everywhere, that domain abc.org sucks would result in domain abc.org beeing ranked top, heh. At least it was a creative way of fraud and motivated google for a move, otherwise google would have lost reputation due to that guy too.
I tried to downgrade my bitbucket subscription to the free plan back before they sold the company, but when I did I just got some error back saying that paypal couldn't charge me 0 dollars.
So I filled a bug, tried again a month or so later and when I still couldn't unsubscribe (I wasn't the only one who had that problem, two others also commented on the bug) sent him a very nasty email, threatening to report him to paypal as a fraudster (impossible to end subscriptions would be a classic fraud technique).
If he had brushed me of rather than told me that I needed to turn of the subscription from paypal I might have ended it right there.
Instead I dragged two other people into it.
Loads of times we've received pretty insulting emails, but done our best to be polite and helpful back, more times then not we've received a really thankful and praising email back in response. A lot of times customers forgot they're sending a message to a real person, and just think they're contacting a faceless corporation.
The upshot is when you give them amazing customer service, they turn into instant evangelists :)
* Company's person in contact with the customer insults the customer/make fun of him/etc (or even swear)
* customer responds politely that it's wrong and uncalled for
* Company respond another sarcastic comment or that it's "not insults" (even when its crystal clear) and that you're in that class of annoying customers
* customer gets real angry
bonus points: * company goes personally against the customer and tries to threaten him by all possible means
Sounds like a true story? Well yeah, it is. ;-)
He doesn't sound like a good customer, I can understand why a company would want to ditch him. Companies shouldn't try to keep all customers all the time. Just read the blog http://notalwaysright.com/ which is full of anecdotes of stupid customers.
These sorts of customers are not, however, automatically "stupid customers". They are "difficult" or "non-profitable". In my experience, a user simply being "stupid" doesn't in itself mean that you shouldn't work with them - in fact, often with a little bit of work, they might even become a reasonable repeat customer.
Like a lot of people who have had customer facing roles, I have enjoyed reading notalwaysright (and the older http://customerssuck.livejournal.com/). But I have found over time the postings to have become more deliberate funny-making or actually problematic from an equality point of view.
Yes. notalwaysright.com is funny, and I'm sure some are good customers. However it's a good 'ammo' against the idea that "The Customer is always right" (a corrollary is that businesses should care about losing any customers).
If it turns out to be the founder/CEO, then we have no hope for the company. But how devastating would it be for your startup if one of your employees did something like this, without your permission. We all know how difficult it is to recruit the right people, but should a mistake like this be un-recoverable?
If you're good at spinning PR and responding correctly, the right apologetic stance can flip this from a PR nightmare to free good PR. The trick is responding fast, responding apologetically, responding honestly, and more than making up for the original mistake.
"We apologize for the lack of respect our CS rep has shown you; he's been terminated and we'd like to offer you a free two years of service and we'll do our best to recover your lost data."
I know a couple of people who resell white-label cPanel hosting, and it's definitely not a full-time job, so I would guess it's probably just one guy (the WHOIS will tell you who).
I know from experience that it's nigh-impossible to stop yourself from using the Royal 'We' as a lone entrepreneur.
I'm sure we've all heard horror stories of shared hosting providers, but personally I've had one just completely disappear, taking my 2 years of prepaid hosting with them (along with hundreds of other customers, at least).
It's not so much about price as about legal status and especially that it's not a 1-man band operating a server out of their College dormroom - or residential internet. If you've a 50-man company hosting you, it's going to be more reliable in my opinion that if there's only 1 or 2 guys behind it.
Nice DoS vector; all I have to do is claim I'm foo.com on Twitter, then I just tell foo.com's host to fuck themselves, and then foo.com is gone forever. It also sounds like a good way to cancel unwanted credit cards. Instead of waiting on hold for hours to talk to high-pressure "you don't really want to cancel, do you" guy, just tell your bank to fuck themselves on Twitter, and your account magically goes away.
Somehow I feel I'm missing something here...
Yes, I got really riled up. Yes, I'm not free from blame. It's kind of ridiculous to delete someone's account based on a personal dispute with no prior notice.
It boggles the mind.
Personally, in my book, you are free from blame. My wife would have had him bleeding from his eye sockets and watching dark corners for the rest of his life.
Some sort of legal action should be brought against your host.
The "go fuck yourself" was a kneejerk reaction to a guy clearly enjoying his powertrip.
If they can prove ownership of the content to liquidweb maybe they can do an end-run around the reseller.
The guys were obviously "bad guys" you know. Being sarcastic and all, about issues that were their and not mine.
Anyhow, I played nice until I got everything, as you recommend. Once I did, I wrote that they had a very poor service etc.
They pasted my communications with them where i've been nice saying that didn't reflect it etc.
Moral of the story, you should do whatever you like, the outcome is hard to determine.
- Backups are your responsibility. Not the hosts, not the government. Not anyone else. You. Period.
- Cannot pay with Paypal? Paypal HQ spontaneously explodes into a huge ball of fiery death? Find another way to pay. It's your responsibility to hold your side of the contract.
http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/the-reddit-incide...
Even if you want to fire this customer, "No soup for you!" is not the right way to do it.
"It's no surprise that when things work as they should, people rarely talk about them. When things don't work, however, people are often very quick to criticise, condemn and even publically discourage the use of the service or product. Fortunately for us, there's none of the latter - and we hope that remains the case for as long as we're in business.
Unfortunately for us, because of an excellent proven track-record, there's relatively little in the way of comments or reviews of this* on the Internet. We'd like to ask for your help to change that.
If you're happy enough to write a review for us, here are some of the best places you could do so: [ ... ] Social Networks - everything from a quick Twitter message to a forum post on any of the forums you frequent. Every little piece of exposure is appreciated!"
Isn't that pretty much...what he did?
Allowing it to descend to the point where backups were deleted is just an absolutely appalling situation though. I've given clients the boot before, but descending to the point where removal of their backups occurs after suspending them is just wrong.
As a provider you're the technical link between someone and their content, and your goal is to protect that content with everything you've got: Destroying it yourself is simply disheartening.
It's sad to see that thiswebhost* has arrived at this point, but the good news is all it will take is some effort & 'emotional distancing' to really improve. I know not many years ago I was in the same position as a fledgling company owner where it's very easy to take things to heart.
Hopefully thiswebhost* can dig through some backups (assuming they still have some) and provide the users with their content.
A 1and1 employee once ripped a domain from me. I was bored and bought top10.eu, a minute after I got a call from that company telling me that he is going to own that domain and I cannot buy it. I told him, you're late my friend, refreshed the browser to be sure about it, it was all ok, yes I owned it. Refreshing my account again revealed that there was no such domain anymore. So much for trust. He called again and said, sorry but you cannot own that domain, I own it now. Man was I pissed.
Trust nobody, even if it's nobody. Do your own backups regularly. Daily and hourly.
They should be the type of person who has the ability to not take insults or criticism about the company personally, they should have a very thick skin, and generally they should almost always be happy and upbeat. It's rare to find this person but even more rare for them to be one of your founders.
If you're in the business of having customers who require support I suggest hiring this person before almost anyone else when you have the ability to do so. It's a game changer.
The only reason I've not brought their actions to light is that I still have some months before my account there expires and they can terminate the account without any reason.
But after reading this I'm very motivated to bring their shady tactics out before they make a buck more by scamming their own evangelists.
> It is our policy not to discuss client accounts with anyone but the account holder. I have unsuspended your account and hope that this allows you to retrieve any data required.
Pretty sure that I'm not the account holder, and yet he's discussing the details with me? I would certainly think twice before considering them as hosts.
1) Most importantly: They store passwords in plaintext and require the last four char of your password whenever you contact support. I kid you not.
2) Almost as important: They shut down customers when they disagree with them politically — this is a Salt Lake City outfit, and therefore extremely anti-gay, and you will be paying people who take down pro-LGBT websites simply for being pro-LGBT.
3) Terrible tech documentation (they "support" Rails but it’s quite difficult to actually use).
I poked LiquidWeb, so they should be aware of the issue.
It wouldn't even have to be Google - anyone with a huge social graph (LinkedIn, Facebook et al) could implement "check your friends' opinion on X".
