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Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)

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

#181

Post by rmc »

hyperbovine wrote: post #75
patio11 wrote: post #52

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.

Redditors are demographically distinct from the average purchaser of web hosting? I'm suspicious.

* They are usually much more price sensitive and want things as cheap as possible * The are usually not running businesses (ergo don't have a lot of money) * They are very used to the free offers like gmail et al., and think since you're charging that you should be better. * They also are a strong believer in getting justice if people (incl. them) get screwed and will readily post things like this in public fora.

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

#182

Post by samarudge »

epochwolf wrote: post #152
jsharpe wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"We're sorry for the issues you've had with your server today, but we're not responsible for looking after your hardware."

A drive failed in a RAID1 array so I contacted their support to get broken the drive replaced, they removed the working drive and destoryed it then insisted it wasn't their fault, I even gave them the serial number of the failed drive before they removed it. I do have my own offsite backups of everything, but it was still annoying to have to restore the entire server

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

#183

Post by alex_c »

Vivtek wrote: post #166
alex_c wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to justify it in any way. Both sides acted completely against their own self-interests.

Anyone working in a professional setting needs to grow a thick skin and deal with situations like this much, much better. Out of self-interest. However, if a customer mistakes this for a license for consequence-free abuse, and is then shocked when someone on the other end snaps and does something stupid, I fail to conjure up too much sympathy or moral outrage, for either party.

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

#184

Post by alanh »

I will take this opportunity to warn everyone about BlueHost.com. Three knocks against them:

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).

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

#185

Post by Vivtek »

rickmb wrote: post #177
Vivtek wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had pathologicals with a free service I offered for a few years. It's an odd, odd mindset.

If a serves offers stuff for free, or against ridiculously low prices, the rule "if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, you are the product" usually applies. These aren't customers with an "odd mindset", these are people that believe that they are an essential part of your product, usually in the form of advertiser fodder, and therefor you owe them. The assumption that you somehow profit from offering…

Maybe you see it that way, but you're not pathological. I had people demanding such or so or they were going to demand a refund.

...

Granted, not many.

Also, the principle "you're not the customer, you're the product", while well-known to you cynical kids today, had not yet really been invented in 1999.

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

#186

Post by jtheory »

davidandgoliath wrote: post #102
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #36

boriskourt: "That's not cool. Suspending a friends account because of a minor PayPal dispute? When did you get into doing that?" 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 provi…

The account was paid up until February of '12, it was new services that had the payment reversed by Paypal. e.g. domain names or something to that effect that they had just bought.

They had it paid up for the future? Ah, that makes this even sadder.

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.

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

#187

Post by X4 »

jarin wrote: post #32
X4 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apparently the owner of the site in question has the same mindset: http://i.imgur.com/gYcys.png

Sorry don't judge without hearing an opinion. I don't share that guy's mindset. I've just pointed that the bad guy business model exists due to google's ranking algorithm, which has changed recently.

However it's clear that this is very bad practice and shouldn't be tolerated by the public.

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

#188

Post by X4 »

wanorris wrote: post #158
X4 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Yes and it's good that he finally gets into prison for acting like a fraudster. Don't see a reason to downvote me because you don't like him. No logic in there.
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