1.) Monthly web hosting invoice unpaid<p>2.) Customer informed and appropriate action taken for unpaid accounts (suspend account for non-payment)<p>3.) Customer's friend makes a public complaint on Twitter<p>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)<p>5.) Non-payee gets abusive<p>6.) Web host deletes the account for abusive behaviour.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>There are a number of extenuating circumstances that can warrant or could result in one or more of these points being appropriate responses.<p>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.
There are better ways to handle one's customers than displayed by the CS employee here, but be that as it may: think long and hard before you get into the business of taking $3 a month from people who are demographically similar to Redditors.
One of the hardest things when communicating with customers is not taking it personally. Don't take criticisms or complaints as personal attacks and above all else resist the temptation to try and "one-up" your customer.<p>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.
TLDR, someone told a hosting company to fuck themselves on Twitter, so the hosting company canceled their hosting?<p>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.<p>Somehow I feel I'm missing something here...
Reason #3 in "Why we're so good" (<a href="http://www.thiswebhost.com/reasons.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.thiswebhost.com/reasons.html</a>): "We want to help. Customer service is very important to us, so we'll treat you like a valued client and not like a number."
Pretty dumb to tweet "go fuck yourself" before you've got your data off their servers - given you've <i>only just</i> seen that they clearly take things personally and act like kids.
I hate to say it, but when you go with bargain basement hosting, you're often going to get bargain basement quality.<p>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).
boriskourt: "That's not cool. Suspending a friends account because of a minor PayPal dispute? When did you get into doing that?"<p>This seems to be about a web host not accepting people not paying their bills.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Aside: berfarah needs to read up on the Gunpowder Plot.
From <a href="http://www.thiswebhost.com/reviewus.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.thiswebhost.com/reviewus.html</a> :<p>"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.<p>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.<p>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!"<p>Isn't that pretty much...what he did?
It's easy to see where both sides originally began from:
As a web hosting provider owner myself, I can see where the default assumption that paypal disputes automatically equal fraud originates. Sadly though it's not the correct stance to really take -- and one has to distance themselves emotionally from every situation (particularly as 'Director', in this case, like Jules) otherwise it'll turn into a shitstorm just about 100% of the time.<p>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 <i>after</i> suspending them is just wrong.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Hopefully thiswebhost* can dig through some backups (assuming they still have some) and provide the users with their content.
<i>It irked me that he didn't seem to care about lost customers</i><p>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 <a href="http://notalwaysright.com/" rel="nofollow">http://notalwaysright.com/</a> which is full of anecdotes of stupid customers.
meh, that sucks.<p>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.<p>Trust nobody, even if it's nobody.
Do your own backups regularly. Daily and hourly.
As someone who runs his own consulting business, if I had clients who didn't know what they were doing and abusive towards me, I'd drop them in a heartbeat. The original poster on reddit isn't going to garner any sympathy from me.
This is why, as a startup or small business, it's crucial to have that guy/gal on your team who is just superb at support and dealing with customers.<p>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.<p>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.
FatCow isn't different. I've promoted their hosting services and they've consistently refused to pay me around $1K.<p>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.<p>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.
I think the Redditor complaining isn't being entirely fair (shock horror, wronged customer doesn't represent both sides of the issue), and I think they handled this the best way they could once it got so big by issuing that statement. That said, it still positively reeks of unprofessionalism, from the smilies in the text to the inarguably weak reasoning:<p>> 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.<p>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.
I will take this opportunity to warn everyone about BlueHost.com. Three knocks against them:<p>1) Most importantly: <i>They store passwords in plaintext</i> and require the last four char of your password whenever you contact support. I kid you not.<p>2) Almost as important: They <i>shut down customers</i> 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.<p>3) Terrible tech documentation (they "support" Rails but it’s quite difficult to actually use).
Is this company run by 15 year olds? This behavior is just ridiculous. Completely unprofessional to delete someone's data in a fit of rage. I seriously hope people boycott this company.
I fear some of the negativity might trickle down, considering this* is a reseller as mentioned.<p>I poked LiquidWeb, so they should be aware of the issue.
This makes me wonder. What's stopping Google from implementing something like "social scam warnings"? It would be nice to see something along the lines "1 of your friends thinks this site is bad" with the search results.<p>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".
Their response, this time not from Jules:
<a href="http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/moving-on/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/moving-on/</a>
I won't judge This* without knowing the whole story. From experience I know that customers can get really retarded PITAs and waste all your time with nonsense.
A couple of points:<p>- Backups are your responsibility. Not the hosts, not the government. Not anyone else. You. Period.<p>- 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.