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Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)

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

#151
post #134
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and feel free to fire your pathological customers. But what they did was close this guy's account and delete his backups without warning. It seems they then did the same to his friend for shooting his mouth off on twitter. That's beyond "handled poorly", that's unprofessional and unethical.

It wasn't awesome. But we're talking about a $3/month host here, is that something you should rely on for backups, even before your account is terminated? If the abusive customer didn't keep a local copy, well, now he's probably learnt to keep a local copy. Having said that, if you choose to run a low cost hosting service, you should know that your customers are going to be greedy entitled bitches, and you should dea…

$3/month host here, is that something you should rely on for backups

Forget about how much you think it costs to host your backups. Think about how much you backups mean to you. What would happen if you didn't have access to your backups?

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

#152
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few months ago, I was told by Rackspace that "We're not responsible for looking after your hardware" after they'd removed, and destroyed, a working hard drive from a dedicated server instead of replacing the disk that had failed, regardless of the price, all hosting is 'bargain basement quality', some are just more bargin than others =)

Isn't "looking after your hardware" exactly what they're responsible for? Why else are they being paid?

I know that rackspace isn't responsible for data loss caused by hardware failure or an accident on their part. A number of rackspace employees have told me (on irc) that I'm responsible for my own backups. Perhaps it was a misquote?

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

#153
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That sort of approach is recommended by things like The 4-hour work week, firing your worst customers. Okay - but removing all of his backups? That's just petty and vindictive. There is zero justification for that.

I actually think it should be a good lesson not to tell people to go fuck themselves when you still need something from them.

Entity theory dictates a separation of business and owner (or person, to be less specific) so as to protect one entity from the actions of the other.

Personally getting pissed off for someone for being a dick? That's fine. Using the business to basically get revenge on them for being a dick? Not fine. You're not there to punish customers for being pissed off.

Guys aren't gonna get very far if they have a paddy with every irate customer that comes along. And everyone who's been in a customer-facing job knows they far outnumber the pleasant folk.

And you know what? I bet the dispute wouldn't even have occurred if the CS rep just said something like 'sorry, we cannot discuss the details of other clients' accounts'.

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

#154
post #151
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't awesome. But we're talking about a $3/month host here, is that something you should rely on for backups, even before your account is terminated? If the abusive customer didn't keep a local copy, well, now he's probably learnt to keep a local copy. Having said that, if you choose to run a low cost hosting service, you should know that your customers are going to be greedy entitled bitches, and you should dea…

$3/month host here, is that something you should rely on for backups Forget about how much you think it costs to host your backups. Think about how much you backups mean to you. What would happen if you didn't have access to your backups?

I wouldn't rely on a $3/month web host for my one and only copy, that's my point.

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

#156

TLDR, someone told a hosting company to fuck themselves on Twitter, so the hosting company canceled their hosting? 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…

Let me be clear (customer here) I told him to go fuck himself AFTER he cancelled not only my account, but that of my friend's. And he did this on a few tweets, based on our Twitter handles - had we been using pseudonyms, that could have been a whole different can of worms. 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…

You did nothing wrong. It's the Internet: people say fuck.

Some sort of legal action should be brought against your host.

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

#157
post #154
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$3/month host here, is that something you should rely on for backups Forget about how much you think it costs to host your backups. Think about how much you backups mean to you. What would happen if you didn't have access to your backups?

I wouldn't rely on a $3/month web host for my one and only copy, that's my point.

But you probably wouldn't use $3 hosting to begin with. The kind of customers who are attracted to this are exactly the kind of people who don't have backups and expect great service for $3. (Because, after all, $3 is a million times more expensive than Google, and Google is pretty reliable...)

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

#158
post #30
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, and that guy (Vitaly Borker of DecorMyEyes.com) has now pled guilty to two federal counts of sending threatening communications, one federal count of mail fraud and one federal count of wire fraud.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/business/13borker.html

Do not try this at home!

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

#159
post #155

Latest update from thiswebhost.com: http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/the-reddit-incide...

I understand where this* is coming from, but I personally still wouldn't do business with them after this. Yes, these customers did lots of things wrong. But a provider that was more committed to customer service would have tried to be constructive in the way that they handled things anyway.

Even if you want to fire this customer, "No soup for you!" is not the right way to do it.

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not very likely. Go and have a look at the rest of their Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/#!/thiswebhost https://twitter.com/#!/thiswebhost/status/102087912497221633 https://twitter.com/#!/oscargodson/status/102092891979132929

That is amazing. Based on their twitter stream you know they are bad news. They would be better off if they spent less time "defending" themselves, and more time making their customers happy enough so they don't want to make "incorrect public statements." https://twitter.com/#!/thiswebhost/status/102089336509562881

No kidding. I really love this line from their latest blog post:

"I would like to remind people that contacting us with abusive e-mail messages is in fact illegal"

"You suck" is not illegal, gents.

Man. What slime.

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