Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com) • Hacker News Board

Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)

#21

Post by tomjen3 » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 9:23 AM UTC

mikey_p wrote: post #17

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.

If you do that you might loose important information.

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.

Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)

#22

Post by oomkiller » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 9:26 AM UTC

rmc wrote: post #19

It irked me that he didn't seem to care about lost customers 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.

Firing customers/clients is fine, but not like this.

Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)

#23

Post by pseudonym » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 9:29 AM UTC

mikey_p wrote: post #17

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.

Dropping them is one thing. Deleting their data is quite another.

Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)

#24

Post by craigmc » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 9:31 AM UTC

mikey_p wrote: post #17

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.

Presumably, if you are professional about it, you'd send them some boiler plate about changes to your service offering or some such, and then nicely hand them back all their files, etc. If you can't see that getting emotionally involved in client management is daft regardless of provocation, etc., then you are running the risk of serious reputational damage (as the web host at the center of this issue is currently finding out)

Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)

#25

Post by Jabbles » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 9:35 AM UTC

thirsteh wrote: post #9

Reason #3 in "Why we're so good" ( http://www.thiswebhost.com/reasons.html ): "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."

How many people do you think "we" is? Could the person that runs the twitter be an employee? They advertise 24/7 customer support. Even if it is an employee, and he is terminated because of this, would that allow you to trust the company again?

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?

Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)

#26

Post by citricsquid » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 9:48 AM UTC

Jabbles wrote: post #25

thirsteh wrote: post #9

Reason #3 in "Why we're so good" ( http://www.thiswebhost.com/reasons.html ): "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."

How many people do you think "we" is? Could the person that runs the twitter be an employee? They advertise 24/7 customer support. Even if it is an employee, and he is terminated because of this, would that allow you to trust the company again? 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,…

I did some looking. The Twitter account appears to have been used by their "Technical Director" Jules. Jules is the same person who replied to the tickets. I then got ahold of their company documents, Jules is not listed as a company owner (or Director) whereas 3 others are. Therefore I am making the assumption that he is indeed only an employee and not someone associated with the higher up management.

Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)

#27

Post by jarin » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 9:49 AM UTC

Jabbles wrote: post #25

thirsteh wrote: post #9

Reason #3 in "Why we're so good" ( http://www.thiswebhost.com/reasons.html ): "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."

How many people do you think "we" is? Could the person that runs the twitter be an employee? They advertise 24/7 customer support. Even if it is an employee, and he is terminated because of this, would that allow you to trust the company again? 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,…

thiswebhost.com appears to be hosted on LiquidWeb's servers, which makes me think it might be a reseller account for Sonet7 (reseller hosting owned by LiquidWeb).

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.

Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)

#28

Post by jarin » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 9:50 AM UTC

citricsquid wrote: post #26

Jabbles wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people do you think "we" is? Could the person that runs the twitter be an employee? They advertise 24/7 customer support. Even if it is an employee, and he is terminated because of this, would that allow you to trust the company again? 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,…

I did some looking. The Twitter account appears to have been used by their "Technical Director" Jules. Jules is the same person who replied to the tickets. I then got ahold of their company documents, Jules is not listed as a company owner (or Director) whereas 3 others are. Therefore I am making the assumption that he is indeed only an employee and not someone associated with the higher up management.

Jules is also listed as the company owner on the reviews:

http://www.webhostingreviews.com/thiswebhost-reviews.htm

And is the registrant of the domain name (and the only contact).

Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)

#29

Post by X4 » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 9:52 AM UTC

meh, that sucks.

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.

Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)

#30

Post by X4 » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 9:58 AM UTC

tomkr wrote: post #18

mikey_p wrote: post #17

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.

There's a difference between dropping a client and treating them disrespectfully. At the very least, the bad publicity isn't worth it.

Sorry, but there was a guy earning millions just because he had the worst customer support. That was his job, to be rude, aggressive and an ass to customers. Really google even changed it's algorithm due to people like him.

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.