Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com) | Hacker News Reader

Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com)

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374 pointslaCour167 comments

1.) Monthly web hosting invoice unpaid

2.) Customer informed and appropriate action taken for unpaid accounts (suspend account for non-payment)

3.) Customer's friend makes a public complaint on Twitter

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)

5.) Non-payee gets abusive

6.) Web host deletes the account for abusive behaviour.

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.

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.

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.

There are a number of extenuating circumstances that can warrant or could result in one or more of these points being appropriate responses.

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.

This is the story from the guy who originally had a dispute with hosting provider.

http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/jk195/stay_the_f...

Odd, from what I've read all the accounts were paid up to date -- but paypal had taken a particular payment back for some new service (a domain name or something to that effect).

#6a) Hosting provider deletes the backups as well.

That was my first thought, but it looks like this company has a trend of poor customer service: http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/jk195/stay_the_f...

Yeah, uh, no. Read the Reddit comments and this*'s twitter stream. This is the kind of support they provide.

> 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.

While I agree, the proper response to "fuck you" shouldn't be "lol, all your shit's gone now, sucker!"

Not even if the question was "kindly pay your hosting bill"?

"Fuck you" then sounds like the equivalent of "kindly delete all my data", no?

(worth noting that two dudes had their stuff deleted - on paid on time, and the other hand paid for most of his services, but due to a PayPal error was unable to pay for all of them.)

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.

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.

Because he gives good advice?

I wish you all possible luck in your non-customer-facing career.

Also a good lesson to back up your site.

It is a good lesson in that, but that in no way justifies deleting the backups.

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'.

If you're no longer in a business relationship with the customer, there is no need to retain backups, unless contractually specified.

Also, is this the same Reddit that does this [1] to clients with unpaid invoices?

[1] http://www.reddit.com/comments/h2e2k/

Reddit is not a single entity. It is a diverse collection of millions of people.

I'd guess that they tried every other possibility to recover their money before pulling that stunt, rather than just flying off the handle and trashing stuff because the other guy said a bad word.

While I may be wrong, reading through the comments on Reddit it seems like 5) happened after 6), not before, and was followed by 7), deletion of all backups.

So if you ever happen to complain about your Comcast service or your phone service, you're fine with the company cutting you off if they ever see that? Right.

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.

Grandparent (patio11) has not implied they were. Are you assuming that selling web hosting services for $3 a month must be a satisfactory business model?

i think the point the parent was trying to make is that there's a couple million redditors - they aren't demographically distinct from anybody. he could have said "the general public" instead.

* 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.

Similar to redditors as in educated, technical and young? Or is this some sort of reference to the liberal bent of the site's users?

I really can't tell what exactly you're alluding to.

I'm assuming it's the "demographic of people who know how to make a blog post and submit it to a popular news aggregator".

But that's just my read of the comment.

Edit: Oh, and pitchforks. 80% of the Reddit demographic keeps a pitchfork in their closets for internet mobs.

Judging from his other comments, I think he just means white, male, tech-enthusiast twenty-somethings without much money. Sell to underserved people with lots of money to throw around and a track record of spending it (instead of people you would hang out with) is the advice patio11 always gives.

Very little money, feel very entitled to suberb service from technical things and anti-commerical and dislike paying a lot for what, in their eyes, is "just simple web hosting"

> think long and hard before you get into the business of taking $3 a month from people who are demographically similar to Redditors

This is so true. Whenever I have a sale of one of my apps and lower the price to $1.99 or something in that range I'm tempted to disable my support mail account.

Cheap people tend to get a huge sense of entitlement when they pay you one or two bucks.

To be fair they did buy it. If you disable your support account then also write a fat bold and _short_ statement such as:

THIS IS PROVIDED WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY AND NO SUPPORT WILL BE GIVEN.

And don't hide that inside 1, 2 or 50 pages of text of course. Then it's all fine. If you don't, then support is going to be expected, no matter the price and that makes complete sense to me.

I call them pathological customers, and they're drawn like flies to low prices. See hnsearch.com [pathological customers] for more on the subject.

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 something for free is not a strange one, hence there is nothing pathological about these people demanding service and respect in the same way paying customers do.

However, paying customers know more or less exactly what to expect, because they can relate it to the amount of $$$ they pay. Customers of "free" services have no idea how much they are worth, so they tend to "negotiate" by aiming high. Yes, this is unpleasant, but it's very naive to be surprised about it, and a little disingenuous to be offended by it.

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.

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 deal with that fact in a professional matter. Otherwise, just get into some other line of business.

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.

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.

No, you definitely shouldn't rely on a $3/month host for backups. However, that does not in any way mean that the $3/month host should not also keep reliable backups. Just because one party can't count on it doesn't mean the other party isn't responsible for it.

$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...)

I don't think many people on HN are at risk of cursing their customers and deleting their data, but many people are repeatedly at risk of undercharging, so that's where I focused my comments. I think "Don't curse at your customers, even if it would be very satisfying giving how much of a raging git they are being" pretty much goes without saying.

Note: This was a company director, not CS employee.

Not only redditors cause problems, -- we refused to sell to anyone with aol.com account for a year or so because the never ending support nightmare that was originating from these customers. It wasn't worth it. We also raised prices (twice) to change demographics, I still get couple of emails a day asking for coupons. disgusting.

Let's just be fair here for a second: I was paying for maybe a 16th of what you would get on Mediatemple for half the price.

But I'm taking people's advice - I will now look into paying over $10-15 per month - I don't want to risk something like this again.

Key is that you need to be willing to give that $3 back at any time, for any reason. An apology and a refund will shut up almost everyone, even if you really did screw it up; or, at least, that has been my experience, and as some HN users can attest, I do screw it up from time to time.

I think a vendor fighting someone who is disputing a $3 charge is the height of irrationality. It's going to cost you way more than $3 to just deal with the dispute, so even if you "win" you lose, and worse, then the customer is angry and might get you a lot of bad publicity.

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.

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.

It's doubly worse at a porn company. People already half-expect you to be scamming them somehow, and come into it with apprehension if not outright hostility.

The upshot is when you give them amazing customer service, they turn into instant evangelists :)

"Upshot"

Which porn company?

I used to be a development manager at Naughty America, but now I'm doing consulting and development for Dirty Hot Productions (and also helping out with customer service, since it just launched and the volume is still low).

I kind of wanted to avoid being "typecast" as an adult developer (I do have non-adult clients as well), but the owner of Dirty Hot Productions used to be a fellow employee at NA, has funding, and I really enjoy building products from scratch so it was hard to pass up.

I'm curious how 'evangelical' someone could be about a porn company? Do you really find word-of-mouth advertising to work for you?

lol word of mouth

Oh definitely, most people don't go around talking about paying for porn sites, but the really hardcore porn customers (the kind who regularly pay for porn) can be extremely loyal if you treat them nicely (and vocal if you don't).

Your comment reminded me of this video by Derek Sivers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfwwHa-7Ux8

That's how it should be, however, it happens the other way around too:

* Company's person in contact with the customer insults the customer/make fun of him/etc (or even swear)

* customer responds politely that it's wrong and uncalled for

* Company respond another sarcastic comment or that it's "not insults" (even when its crystal clear) and that you're in that class of annoying customers

* customer gets real angry

bonus points: * company goes personally against the customer and tries to threaten him by all possible means

Sounds like a true story? Well yeah, it is. ;-)

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 cancel, do you" guy, just tell your bank to fuck themselves on Twitter, and your account magically goes away.

Somehow I feel I'm missing something here...

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 prior notice.

So you supported your friend on Twitter, he cancelled your account, you really took exception, and he deleted your backups to put you in your place.

It boggles the mind.

Personally, in my book, you are free from blame. My wife would have had him bleeding from his eye sockets and watching dark corners for the rest of his life.

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

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

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

No. Legal action is hell for both parties. Why put yourself in hell? Especially for a $3/month hosting service?

Why put yourself in hell?

For the enjoyment of seeing the other party in hell.

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?

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).

WhoIs lookup shows him as the domain owner

Registrant Contact: ThisWebHost Jules Robinson ()

Fax: South Building Upper Farm Basingstoke, HAMPSHIRE RG23 8PE GB

Administrative Contact: ThisWebHost Jules Robinson (domains@thiswebhost.com) +1.5555555555 Fax +1.5555555555 South Building Upper Farm Basingstoke, HAMPSHIRE RG23 8PE GB

Technical Contact: ThisWebHost Jules Robinson (domains@thiswebhost.com) +1.5555555555 Fax +1.5555555555 South Building Upper Farm Basingstoke, HAMPSHIRE RG23 8PE GB

Also he appears to be using a fake phone number on the WhoIs, am I right in thinking you're not allowed to do that?

Technically you are not allowed to provide fake information, although you may use an identity proxy as long as they provide the means to contact you in case of a dispute. In reality, enforcement of valid identity information is essentially non-existent.

I'm personally aware of at least one incident in which someone who had their domain revoked for 'joke' contact details in the whois db. Then again, istr they did piss off an old-school sysadmin (in the a.s.r sense).

As a Brit, it doesn't surprise me at the British address here. I work primarily with US companies but the most obnoxious service I get tends to be from the British ones. An idea of "honor above money" seems to be more prevalent here in the UK, whereas in the US it seems you're more likely to just get ignored.

It's against the rules to use false info so feel free to email contact@namecheap.com with that little bit of info.

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.

If it's on liquidweb shared hosting then there are four levels of backups with rotations on an external drive array. They don't mess around.

Not sure if they could do an end-run around a reseller to liquidweb and prove ownership, but the backup is definitely there and undeleteable at a reseller level.

Someone should point that out to the former customer.

It depends entirely on how it's handled by the actual owner, assuming this is just an employee.

If you're good at spinning PR and responding correctly, the right apologetic stance can flip this from a PR nightmare to free good PR. The trick is responding fast, responding apologetically, responding honestly, and more than making up for the original mistake.

"We apologize for the lack of respect our CS rep has shown you; he's been terminated and we'd like to offer you a free two years of service and we'll do our best to recover your lost data."

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.

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?

Pretty dumb to tweet "go fuck yourself" before you've got your data off their servers - given you've only just seen that they clearly take things personally and act like kids.

Hey - the customer in question here. I'll admit, it was really stupid, definitely a mistake - I was really angry. My friend had just told me my site was down, and I got an email saying my account had been terminated, and then to top it off, a tweet saying "good luck finding your next hosting provider".

The "go fuck yourself" was a kneejerk reaction to a guy clearly enjoying his powertrip.

Tell your friend if it's on liquidweb shared hosting then there are four levels of backups with rotations on an external drive array. The data is definitely there and a reseller can get it restored within an hour for free - if they are motivated of course.

If they can prove ownership of the content to liquidweb maybe they can do an end-run around the reseller.

Thanks, I'm looking into that.

I had such a relation with a provider (not hosting, but anyway).

The guys were obviously "bad guys" you know. Being sarcastic and all, about issues that were their and not mine.

Anyhow, I played nice until I got everything, as you recommend. Once I did, I wrote that they had a very poor service etc.

They pasted my communications with them where i've been nice saying that didn't reflect it etc.

Moral of the story, you should do whatever you like, the outcome is hard to determine.

I 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).

I have to agree on some counts. I see a lot of people get burned by companies every year or so - often when they sell and change owners - and then jump ship to just another random more-or-less anonymous webhost.

It's not so much about price as about legal status and especially that it's not a 1-man band operating a server out of their College dormroom - or residential internet. If you've a 50-man company hosting you, it's going to be more reliable in my opinion that if there's only 1 or 2 guys behind it.

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?

"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

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.

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 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.

Aside: berfarah needs to read up on the Gunpowder Plot.

http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/jk195/stay_the_f...

He explains that there was a valid reason for not being able to pay the bills (I.E. PayPal having a problem). This* then suspended all of his accounts (Including the ones that had already been payed for) and, from the looks of it, were very unhelpful in resolving the situation.

Yes, if the PayPal payment didn't come through the domains should probably have been suspended as they hadn't been payed for, but not the entire account and certainly not denying access to backups

>there was a valid reason for not being able to pay the bills (I.E. PayPal having a problem) //

It's an excuse, but it's not payment. Continuation of the contract would presumably require payment. A clients inability to pay ends their right to receive service.

Sure a larger company can usually manage to give grace in such situations (but often won't) but small businesses, as this appears to be, seem to suffer a lot more with cash flow problems.

So the story goes:

1. customer doesn't pay

2. customer and friend argue that not paying shouldn't get their account suspended

3. customers friend tells company to FOAD (or whatever)

4. company terminates all services

5. customer and friend start internet campaign

I'm really struggling to see how the company are supposed to have acted so badly - is it really considered such a crime to not let people have service without rendering payment?

Of course, as ever, there's a lack of detail as to the amounts left unpaid and the nature of the PayPal issue and so none of us should really be offering ludicrously emotional and dramatic judgements about either party.

I don't think that's the issue, the issue was that they suspended accounts and sites that had already been payed for, and the only payment method the company offers is PayPal so there was no reasonable way for the customer to pay the outstanding ballance immediately (About $5 from the looks of it). He also offered proof that the small outstanding ballance would be payed within a couple of days.

Yes if it was +$100 maybe more serious action should have been taken, but it was just one domain on an account that, up to that point, had never had any issues with payments before (I'm assuming that but the support guy is so defensive I'm sure it would have been brought up before now). Even so there is no reason to just straight out cancel someones entire account without even contacting them, for all they knew the payment could have gone through without a problem.

I think cancelling the paid account is bad, but not disastrous. Deleting all of his backups, however, is petty at best, criminal at worst.

If this is how things went down I see just about equal fault on both sides (contracts aside, I'd guess suspension of all accounts is in the "if you don't pay" part of the contract if not then there's something there for sure).

When the accounts were suspended for non payment instead of telling the host to "fuck off" they could have attempted to arrange an alternate payment method. If they were going to antagonise their former host (I say former as the obligation to host the data presumably ended on non-payment) then they could have used their CP, it seems, to download backups - then they could profane their host for wanting payment in return for service happy in the knowledge they were untouchable.

As I understand it, there are two people here. Guy[a] didn't pay, and had his account shut down. Fine. Guy[b], who is Guy[a]'s friend, simply bitched them out on twitter, and lost his account - along with ALL of his backups - in the process.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I were Guy[b], I'd consider googling lawyers.

> Of course, as ever, there's a lack of detail as to the amounts left unpaid and the nature of the PayPal issue and so none of us should really be offering ludicrously emotional and dramatic judgements about either party.

Did you not read the comment on the Reddit link GP provided? It is by the customer in question and very clearly lays out the situation, including the amount of payments blocked by PayPal

(Of course, the assumption is that the details are accurate, which IMO is a fair one to make, given that the service provider hasn't been too forthcoming)

I'm using linode and I've had problems with payment once. They contacted me and we solved it within day or two. I don't know details of this story, but suspending account immediately seems like overreacting.

It's certainly within the rights of a company to terminate upon first missed payment, even if it's the fault of PayPal. However, it's NOT ok to terminate accounts that have been paid for and then act childish towards your customer.

Edit: I can't believe I had to spell that out for you...

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.

This* terminated his account (that was paid and in good standing!) and deleted all his data, including databases for calling them out on twitter. Seriously. That's just insane.

If you still think that this* is somehow justified in any way, read their twitter feed. This isn't the only time a customer has been treated like crap by this*.

FWIW I read the twitter feeds of both subjects (but not of This*). All I saw was (paraphrasing) "I can't believe my PayPal excuse didn't wash", "fuck you for suspending out account", "oh noes you deleted it all now"; very roughly speaking.

Can you point out the bit in the Twitter feeds where we become privy your supposed fact that any service was terminated that was in good standing.

Basically you're saying that the web host maliciously shut down the account without any cause. Can you quote me the bit in the Twitter feed that proves this.

From http://www.thiswebhost.com/reviewus.html :

"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.

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.

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!"

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.

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 after suspending them is just wrong.

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.

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.

Hopefully thiswebhost* can dig through some backups (assuming they still have some) and provide the users with their content.

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.

I am of the opinion that businesses are defined by how they handle the exit of customers more than by how they handle take-on of customers. A customer being difficult to manage or not profitable still deserves a professional exit.

These sorts of customers are not, however, automatically "stupid customers". They are "difficult" or "non-profitable". In my experience, a user simply being "stupid" doesn't in itself mean that you shouldn't work with them - in fact, often with a little bit of work, they might even become a reasonable repeat customer.

Like a lot of people who have had customer facing roles, I have enjoyed reading notalwaysright (and the older http://customerssuck.livejournal.com/). But I have found over time the postings to have become more deliberate funny-making or actually problematic from an equality point of view.

These sorts of customers are not, however, automatically "stupid customers". They are "difficult" or "non-profitable".

Yes. notalwaysright.com is funny, and I'm sure some are good customers. However it's a good 'ammo' against the idea that "The Customer is always right" (a corrollary is that businesses should care about losing any customers).

Right...what's the metric? 10% of your customers will consume 90% of your customer handling resources?

There's a difference between, "didn't bend over backwards to retain a difficult customer," and "took to personally bashing the customer in public and willy-nilly terminating services due to public criticism."

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.

Seems like an unwise legal move to make it look like you deleted the data not out of policy, but out of a desire to harm the (now former) customer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

I'm a consultant too, and I've had the occasional abusive client just like everyone has at some point. And who hasn't had several clients who were just oblivious to reality?

I've kicked them to the curb as soon as possible, but not before sending them their source code (at least up until the last commit paid for), server passwords, backups, assets, and whatever else I can find.

I've never, ever, deleted anything or brought a server down just because I was angry at them. And thank goodness too, because half of the time they come back after they've had a chance to cool off.

Would you then trash your client's data after they cursed at you just to get even with them?

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.

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.

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.

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.

FatCow isn't different. I've promoted their hosting services and they've consistently refused to pay me around $1K.

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.

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:

> 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.

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).

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.

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.

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".

Maybe I'm old fashioned but I really hate the idea of using twitter as a customer service and account management vector.

Their response, this time not from Jules: http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/moving-on/

That's the thing about customer service. People are gonna call you out, but professionalism is in not rising to it.

Do we really need a third thread about this?

BOFH much.

You better believe everyone will hear about this and drop them. Very unprofessional for a grown man to act like a child.

You are assuming he's a grown man.

Even more unprofessional to allow a child to do your customer service, so assuming he's a grown man is really giving them the benefit of the doubt now isn't it?

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.

What are the twitter accounts of the customers? All I've seen here is a couple of DM's from the host and a couple of emails from the host.

https://twitter.com/berfarah & https://twitter.com/boriskourt

Unprofessional behaviour from the host, but these guys should perhaps have employed a bit of professionalism too - I wouldn't be surprised if the 'perpetually indignant' twitter mode of address, and the tendency to want to summon up mob of the righteous whenever possible, has spilled over into their dealings with this company. Seems like twitter has given every angry person the opportunity to wave a banner of Truth and Justice 24/7. However, even seeing the twitter streams, all the facts are not out in the open, so this is just my unscientific take on it. I expect it'll be an unpopular view.

I think there's some truth there. Both sides acted like children, but the reason the focus is more on the hosting company is that they abused their power.

As far as the attitudes go, when you're reselling $2.95/month hosting you're going to get $2.95/month customers. In my experience, cheap customers are the most likely to squabble and gripe and moan over tiny things and drive you crazy. But hey, you make your bed and you gotta sleep in it. And don't delete your bed's data and backups over a twitter hissy fit.

and on that $2.95 your profit is $1.50 a month ... that doesn't buy a lot of "taking shit".

Maybe not, but collateral damage caused by handling it in a wrong way may be worth few orders of magnitude more.

A couple of points:

- Backups are your responsibility. Not the hosts, not the government. Not anyone else. You. Period.

- 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.

From the looks of it, the company offers no other payment options other than PayPal and didn't provide any information otherwise (I.E. "We need this now, please wire us the money, here's our account details")

And when they only accept Paypal? What do yo do then? I don't care if I have backups. Such a termination of services and further purging of data is a big no-no in my books.

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