Their response, this time not from Jules:
http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/moving-on/
Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)
161–170 of 188 posts
Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)
#162Earlier 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…
Again, it's worse than "not awesome", it's unprofessional and unethical. If you commit to provide a service, whether you're charging $1 or $100k per month, there are some minimum standards of behavior you should hold yourself to. This isn't "you get what you pay for" because the host went down. Maliciously deleting backups that you're supposedly responsible for, over a twitter slapfight, is unethical. No matter what.
Do you know that he was actually responsible for backing up this data? This hosting plan costs less than some places charge just for maintaining backups.
Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My favorite part is where he says he'd like to unsuspend the one guy's account, except that he used a Naughty Word and so there's no way he can do that now. I mean, what the, ahem, fuck?
Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)
#164I 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:
> 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.
Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)
#165I hate to say it, but when you go with bargain basement hosting, you're often going to get bargain basement quality. 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).
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 =)
Although RackSpace is expensive I have never had anything but great support from them. I recommend you escalate your issue as this extremely out of line for them.
Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remind me not to depend on you ever in any situation where tempers may rise.
Do you disagree that, generally speaking, it's a bad idea to tell someone to go fuck themselves when you still need something from them? Both sides acted childish, but I can't see why a negative outcome would come as a shock to anyone.
Generally speaking, it's a bad idea to harm people to stoke your ego, too.
Let's say I flip out in my local bank branch. They're perfectly justified in calling the police, because it is a bad idea to yell at people at the bank - but they would not be justified in closing my account and keeping the money to "teach me a lesson", and that is essentially what happened here.
I find it a shocking lapse of professionalism to do anything like this, and I find it incomprehensible that an adult could think it was justified. Seriously. You just don't act like this in the real world and hope to stay in business - sooner or later this attitude will kill you. Customers do flip out and tell you to fuck off, they just do. You either learn to act like an adult about it - maybe step away from Twitter for a while - or you quit, and get a job that doesn't involve interaction with customers. Or co-workers. Or anybody else that might harsh your fragile calm.
Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, it's worse than "not awesome", it's unprofessional and unethical. If you commit to provide a service, whether you're charging $1 or $100k per month, there are some minimum standards of behavior you should hold yourself to. This isn't "you get what you pay for" because the host went down. Maliciously deleting backups that you're supposedly responsible for, over a twitter slapfight, is unethical. No matter what.
Do you know that he was actually responsible for backing up this data? This hosting plan costs less than some places charge just for maintaining backups.
They did have the backups - and said so - and then deleted them just to be assholes. So it's moot whether they were responsible for backing up the data; the issue is they deleted it on purpose just to hurt.
Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)
#168Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know that he was actually responsible for backing up this data? This hosting plan costs less than some places charge just for maintaining backups.
They did have the backups - and said so - and then deleted them just to be assholes. So it's moot whether they were responsible for backing up the data; the issue is they deleted it on purpose just to hurt.
They had already terminated their service agreement with this person. If I were a low-margin hosting reseller, I wouldn't bother to keep around the data of ex-customers either.
Re: Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did have the backups - and said so - and then deleted them just to be assholes. So it's moot whether they were responsible for backing up the data; the issue is they deleted it on purpose just to hurt.
They had already terminated their service agreement with this person. If I were a low-margin hosting reseller, I wouldn't bother to keep around the data of ex-customers either.
Except that they did keep the data of the ex-customer that didn't curse at them, and have now reinstated his account.