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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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"

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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