Moving On...

http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/moving-on/

by laCour • 15 years ago

118 114 15 years ago

Eyalush• 15 years ago

I can appreciate the effort and the sentiment of this post, but it definitely reveals a "shoot from the hip" mentality at the company.

geuis• 15 years ago

It more likely reveals a single person who works for this company that personally performed these actions. People all to often attribute the actions of individuals inside a company as the actions of the company. The two are not the same.

jdelsman• 15 years ago

It more likely reveals that "Doug" and "Jules" are the same 14-year-old in his mom's basement.

samdalton2• 15 years ago

I've been with thiswebhost for a number of years now, and Jules has always been the one to answer support tickets, fix server issues, write blog posts, talk to people on twitter and facebook, etc. Running a shared hosting business in the way that they do can't be very easy, so I suppose it's not always feasible to hire full time customer service staff. The latest post addresses that, and explains mostly everything that went wrong with this ordeal.

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

>People all to often attribute the actions of individuals inside a company as the actions of the company. The two are not the same.

ok. So how or who performs "the actions of a company" if not the "individuals inside the company"? Especially if these individuals are explicitly given access to official twitter account, etc... of the company.

xtracto2• 15 years ago

The problem here for me is that said individual is still working within the company. Thus, even if I never hear of him, nobody can guarantee that I won't be bitten by his unprofessional behaviour later if I keep doing business with the company.

And after all, said individual did performed actions while wearing his administrator hat. This deffinitely makes him part of the company.

Why do you think Google, Microsoft and all other big companies do not allow Engineers and programmers to make public statements (about the company), unless they specify with uppercase bolds that this is their own opinion.

mtogo2• 15 years ago

So... one guy did all this, it was inappropriate, but you're keeping him on board?

I think the purpose of this blog post was to try to reclaim this*'s reputation after the incident, but for me it just solidified that i should never, ever use thiswebhost.

rkalla2• 15 years ago

From a customer/outside perspective, I absolutely see how you are coming to this conclusion, but if I suddenly handed you the checkbook to that company, keys to the office and said "Keep this place running, keep making money and keep paying these 10 salaries" your conclusion would probably be different.

I am impressed that the company had the foresight to realize that the people they currently have on suck at CS and need to be replaced with someone better at it.

That is a very self-aware decision.

Also you can't cut your nose off despite your face. Jules is clearly a talented tech lead and you can't boot the only guy out the door that understands the inner workings of such a technical company/service.

I am impressed with how this small company is dealing with this; they are doing the best they possibly can.

The proof will be in the long-term-pudding for sure, but I think these are all sensible moves.

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

>but you're keeping him on board?

what are the alternatives ? that guy seems to be a company owner and the registrant of the domain, ie. basically the guy _is_ the company :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890546

eric-hu4• 15 years ago

Interesting. You make me wonder if Doug (the new blog post writer) actually works for the company or if he's even a real person.

eric-hu4• 15 years ago

I'd also like to see this guy axed, but I can see why they'd want to keep him. Perhaps he holds enough specific technical knowledge that they have to keep him.

What I'm unclear on is why Bernardo can't be invited back. Was his account deleted in such a way that it's unrecoverable? If so, they're keeping someone who deleted potentially months of a customer's work and data, and claiming it's within reason over one use of the f-bomb.

What if another client's Twitter account is hacked? This policy sounds like an open invite to malicious third parties.

puredemo3• 15 years ago

>Was his account deleted in such a way that it's unrecoverable?

Apparently so..

Vivtek3• 15 years ago

No, actually, if he's technically good, I would also keep him with the admonishment that if he ever interacted with a customer again I'd play tennis with his spleen. I was perfectly happy with this post through that part.

tiles• 15 years ago

I'm still impressed that neither blog post by This addressed why Boris' account was seemingly baselessly suspended (which ultimately led to the Go Fuck Yourself comment), since all he did was inquire about the PayPal dispute. The revising of their Tos Is a great step forward, but that point alone remains really troubling.

rkalla2• 15 years ago

I think this was hand-waved away with the admission that Jules is terrible at customer support... the implication being that he was on a rage-bender and nuked the account.

trickjarrett• 15 years ago

Terrible is not the right word, 'unthinkingly destructive' perhaps.

WettowelReactor• 15 years ago

"I would like to remind people that contacting us with abusive e-mail messages is in fact illegal and we will be taking the appropriate steps to forward these messages and information gathered to both the relevant ISP’s and law enforcement agencies."

So criticism is still not tolerated it sounds to me that these guys still dont get it.

rvanniekerk3• 15 years ago

Criticism is one thing, death-threats and hate mail are something entirely different.

desigooner• 15 years ago

This blog post was preceded by a different post by Jules. That post was deleted and this post by Doug took it's place instead.

Here's the google cache link of the deleted post: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=ca...

Content of the deleted post:

The Reddit Incident

POSTED BY Jules ON August 16, 2011 AT 4:45 pm UNDER Uncategorized I’m sure you may have heard about it by now, and if not I’m sure you soon will! I wanted to take this opportunity to make a blog post about the situation and post some information from our side of the fence. Before I begin though, I’d like to thank the tens of people who felt the need to e-mail us death threats and general profanity. We have forwarded these on to your ISP’s abuse departments.

Yesterday on Twitter we were asked by a user why their friends account was suspended because of a PayPal dispute. Our terms and conditions are very clear that in the case of any PayPal disputes, or other payment disputes, all services are suspended until the dispute is closed and the payment issue(s) resolved. These are typical terms that most web hosting providers have, and in some cases a provider will even charge a fee to restore any accounts that have been suspended because of a payment dispute. We don’t, for the record.

So, when asked why their friends account was suspended we told them “Our terms are very clear. Your friend should not have opened a fraudulent dispute.” We then sent a DM to the individual who asked, saying the following: “Please mind your own business. Your friends account, and PayPal dispute has nothing to do with you.” Of course, as a hosting provider we cannot discuss the details of another account and its status with others. Because of this message, we were informed that they would be canceling their accounts due to our “unprofessional-ism”. After much continued pushing from these users, we then responded (rather sarcastically I might add) with the following: “Fantastic. Perhaps you can sign up with a hosting provider who doesn’t take privacy seriously then. Enjoy.”

We take privacy very seriously. If your friend has an issue with their account, your friend needs to contact us. Despite being your friend, it does not mean we will discuss their account(s) with you and it does not entitle you to demand information about a specific issue or incident. Your friends account is theirs, and theirs alone.

So, cue more pushing and baiting on Twitter and we then come to the conclusion that this situation is obviously some attempt for these users to attack us for reasons unknown, and we decide to end our business relationship with them. What this effectively means is that we decide to suspend their account(s) and offer them a full backup of their data with us. Of the two users we did this for, one of them was extremely polite and requested a backup of their data, which we provided to them. This user also had domains in their account which they still have full access to, and we even informed them via e-mail that they should transfer them to another provider as soon as possible as we would no longer be providing support to them.

The other posted on Twitter that they were looking for another hosting provider, to which we responded “Best of luck with your new host!”. This was not intended to be a taunt, this was intended to be the closing line to our discussion with them. Our way of saying “OK, best of luck, we consider this matter closed now”. Unfortunately, this user interpreted it to be a taunt or goad. They then responded with direct profanity aimed at us. At this point before the profanity I’d like to state that their account was only suspended. They had full access to a backup of their data and files.

After the profanity (which was completely unnecessary) we terminated the account immediately, no longer wishing to do any form of business or communication with the client. As part of our termination system, any backups we store for an account are automatically removed via an action hook we have deployed. We don’t see any logic in storing data for terminated accounts that we no longer host, so they are removed instantly. Please note; this wasn’t a manual “Oh I’m going to remove your backups because you swore at me!” situation. This was an automated process that occurs immediately after any account on our servers is terminated.

So let’s just recap a little; we have 1 account that is suspended with full access to a backup of their data and their domain names. We have another account that is fully terminated, with all data removed, due to severe breach of our terms.

And then we have the Twitter/Reddit aftermath….

Now, I fully understand how as a customer or potential customer, a hosting provider terminating your account and deleting your data without notice is a bad thing. Hell, if it happened to me I’d be very angry indeed. But what you have to remember is that this isn’t a typical situation, and certainly isn’t a random event. This is the direct result of publically swearing at and abusing your hosting provider, something which is actually covered in our Acceptable Usage Policy and results in instant account termination. Please also remember that before the termination, the customer was able to obtain all of their data in the way of a backup should they have requested it. The moment they decided to cross that line and become abusive in that manner, they made a conscious choice to break our terms and the result is the enforcement of that. The other friend who didn’t decide to abuse us? They still have full access to their data and domains, and are presumably looking for a new host.

I’m not saying we’re right and the users were wrong. I’m not saying that perhaps some other hosting providers would’ve dealt with the suspension(s) and termination differently, to each their own. What you need to discern is that this is an extremely rare situation. Our terms and conditions were broken, something that very rarely happens, but when it does the outcome is always the same. These are our policies and these are how we respond. Many of you won’t know because quite frankly, you’ll never break our terms – which is precisely the issue here. Ridicule us for it if you will.

puredemo3• 15 years ago

TL;DR: I deleted all your backups over one swear word. Now I'm justifying it because profanity equals abuse.

wickedchicken• 15 years ago

> profanity equals abuse

which is illegal under an internet law I just made up. You could go to jail.

benatkin2• 15 years ago

Which after seeing the tweets, was better than I expected. The big issues I have with it, as damage control (i. e. not counting the deleting of the backup and previous exchanges), are the lack of a real apology and the lumping of general profanity in with death threats in what supposably got forwarded to ISP abuse departments.

> Before I begin though, I’d like to thank the tens of people who felt the need to e-mail us death threats and general profanity. We have forwarded these on to your ISP’s abuse departments.

bdonlan• 15 years ago

It also should be pointed out that paypal disputes can sometimes be automatically opened by paypal - I had one opened once, and the automatic system didn't even offer an option to comment and say "Yes, I did mean to make this transaction"; I had to call in to get it resolved.

lsc4• 15 years ago

yeah, my customers get maybe 2-3 of those a month (vs, maybe 1-2 actual disputes a year) I mean, I don't know of any of the times that the payment was actually fraudulent; the customer sends me another payment and it'll go through.

duck• 15 years ago

Why do people (and in this case a "technical" person) think they can delete anything after they post it?

tedunangst3• 15 years ago

Why are people so adamant that nothing ever be deleted or changed?

If you say something ridiculous and you don't delete it, you are in effect continuing to say it. They aren't pretending they never said it, they are acting like what was said doesn't belong on their website.

I don't think anyone should be responsible for archiving and publishing their own mistakes for all eternity. If you want to archive it, fine. They aren't shooting out takedown notices.

coryl• 15 years ago

Oh man, I hope everyone reading this understands the consequence of putting a person who doesn't understand public relations or customer service, into a position such as customer service.

palish• 15 years ago

Could you elaborate a little on why Jules' blog post was bad?

It seemed completely straight-up. "X happened, Y happened, Z happened". Whether or not we agree with their decision, it seems like a good (for us) thing to hear the full sequence of events.

dolphenstein2• 15 years ago

Quintessential BOFH behaviour!

bobroberts• 15 years ago

Direct enough. I know never to use their service. Thanks for the heads up.

dolphenstein2• 15 years ago

It looks like Basil Fawlty has branched out his business into web hosting!

elliottcarlson• 15 years ago

From what I understand, from doing some research, this is not necessarily the case. Threatening someone would be illegal, harassment as well - but profanity for the most part is not illegal in most places (though there are certain states and countries that do have profanity laws). Additionally, "abusive" is a term that can be quite broad, and in certain cases it could definitely be a judgement call on how one person might see it compared to someone else. I'm not saying people should go cursing out any one they have a complaint with, but at the same time if you are dealing with customer support, you need to have thick skin and patience - and if necessary then cancel the business relationship with the customer, but don't go pulling the legal card on an unhappy customer in every case.

systems• 15 years ago

the web hosting business is a ghetto, just check the horror stories on webhostingtalk and you will learn never to trust a hosting company

and only buy hosting from extremely reputable companies

Athtar• 15 years ago

Perhaps I am reading too much into it but why did they not mention that they took down the previous blog post (http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/the-reddit-incide...)? They mention that they took down the tweets but why no mention of the blog posts?

gfunk911• 15 years ago

1. Are there seriously smiley faces in this serious post defending your company?

2. From what I can understand, they suspended multiple accounts, one of which was paid in full. The paid in full account's owner cursed out the company on twitter.

If I have a Rackspace account, I can go into twitter and say "Rackspace fucking sucks, everyone who works there can go fuck themselves," and there's no chance in hell my account would be canceled. The idea that they are still defending this action is unbelievable.

If I hypothetically had an account with This* (which I would never ever have), and there's an outage of some kind and I call to complain, I'm going to be afraid that if I lose my cool for a second, my account's gonna be canceled. I'm not exaggerating, I would legitimately have that fear. And one is supposed to do business with this people? Are they out of their minds?

strathmeyer2• 15 years ago

They had me at the exclamation point, and kept me rolling all the way to "this is why comments have been disabled".

philwelch• 15 years ago

> I assume everyone will agree with this statement, but I'll state it anyway: You can't cancel valid accounts! If the account is paid in full, and assuming the account isn't being used for nefarious purposes, you cannot cancel valid accounts for any reason.

I'll agree with that, but with qualifications. Certainly you don't just cut off somebody's service. But there are pathological clients who aren't worth keeping on. I don't want to go into details, but I've personally seen one particular case, at a hosting company I once worked for, where it was no longer worth the time and aggravation to keep a certain customer, despite their (as far as I knew) flawless payment record.. We gave them a month to find another service provider, but there was no way we would allow them to remain a customer after that.

As a business, you have the right to deny service to anyone for any reason, aside from certain protected classes such as race and sex. Unless you're broke, you can and should exercise this right to whatever extent it benefits your business. And even if you're broke, sometimes you should consider it.

drewcrawford• 15 years ago

I understand 100%, as I'm a small shop and I turn away bad clients all the time. But if you're not going to provide the service, you return the money, and you _definately don't delete the backups_!

What This* did is terminate the account, pocket the money, and delete the backups. Not only is that unprofessional, it's _illegal_. If it weren't it would give a legal defense to every person charged with fraud ("we just decided to terminate the business relationship without a refund").

wvenable2• 15 years ago

> We gave them a month to find another service provider, but there was no way we would allow them to remain a customer after that.

That is exactly the right way to handle the situation and, in my opinion, does not contradict what gfunk said. If you were to simply cut off a client, no notice, for no other reason except you don't like them -- that's not right.

giberson• 15 years ago

I assume everyone will agree with this statement, but I'll state it anyway: You can't cancel valid accounts! If the account is paid in full, and assuming the account isn't being used for nefarious purposes, you cannot cancel valid accounts for any reason. If I have a Rackspace account, I can go into twitter and say "Rackspace fucking sucks, everyone who works there can go fuck themselves," and there's no chance in hell my account would be canceled. The idea that they are still defending this action is unbelievable.

You are way off base on this point.

Any company can refuse service to an individual for any non discriminatory circumstance. A company can't refuse your business because your race, ethnicity, age or sex or any other determination of discrimination by law but they certainly don't have to do business with you if you're a dick (Pardon my language). If you want to badmouth a company's service or product that you are currently using they certainly can choose to let (force) you to take your business elsewhere (closing your account). You may be entitled to a refund matching the remaining duration on your account, maybe--but as a company they don't have to put up with you forever just because you gave them some money.

Now, I'm not defending This*'s customer service or actions, I'm simply pointing out a blatantly false presupposition you are making.

chc• 15 years ago

You're making a statement about the law. I don't think the comment you're replying to was. "Can" is not identical to "may legally." A more reasonable reading of the parent would be "You can't cancel valid accounts and maintain any kind of credibility."

sunchild• 15 years ago

Depends on the ToS. Also, it's bad business no matter how you justify it.

utunga• 15 years ago

> Any company can refuse service to an individual for any non discriminatory circumstance.

Well, sure, ahead of time, but not after the contract has begun.

raldi5• 15 years ago

If you're taking a bus between two cities, can they decide in the middle of the trip that they don't want your business anymore, refund half your money, and leave you at the side of the road?

Of course not. That's called breach of contract.

And unless This* has a carefully-written escape clause in their service contract, they would be just as liable for canceling service in the middle of a contract period as well.

csomar• 15 years ago

No, there are limits. They differ from a company (and person) to another but they are usually the same. Do you accept that your client does sexual harassment to one of your employees?

I work as a freelance communicating with people with Skype. If someone has a bad tone, I'll politely tell him to change. If he doesn't, I'll refuse to work with him. I'll pull a refund for him, but that's only in the case I did no work.

sapphirecat• 15 years ago

I'd agree on ethical grounds, but legally, just about every TOS I have read states that they can cancel an account at any time, for any reason. I don't know if this would hold up in court, though.

liquidcool• 15 years ago

This and similar PR nightmares show how little smaller companies understand PR and the right way to handle these situations. Responses should be apologetic and serious in tone, even when the customer was not completely in the right (but is perceived that way by the public). They should clearly state the corrective actions taken. Regarding the employee in question, you can defend the person, but be careful how you address their actions. The corrective action for that employee should go way beyond "that naughty boy won't get to talk with customers any more, ha ha!" The public perceives you have an unstable employee with power over their data (read: livelihood), so counseling/training at minimum (if you don't think the lost business is grounds for termination; probably easy to estimate that, and a smart mgmt. team will do that).

And - holy cow! - you don't have a customer service rep writing the response, you have the CEO or owner do it. That it wasn't goes back to my original point - they don't (yet) recognize this as a PR disaster.

latch• 15 years ago

I think the post is slightly unprofessional, but I nonetheless think it does a good job of trying to move beyond the issue.

I think people calling for Jules' head are flat our wrong. To the best of my knowledge, he isn't a repeat offender, and now this* has made it unlikely that he will be, without having to fire him (and coincidentally, allowing him to do what this* considers him good at).

I'm generally not crazy about "off-with-his-head" mentality.

Terretta• 15 years ago

> isn't a repeat offender

I'd had a glance at the last couple weeks worth of tweets and they seemed generally more "the customer's never right, good riddance" than most official twitter accounts.

Smelled like burned out admin to me.

philk2• 15 years ago

I would like to remind people that contacting us with abusive e-mail messages is in fact illegal and we will be taking the appropriate steps to forward these messages and information gathered to both the relevant ISP’s and law enforcement agencies. Sadly it is the people who post such messages that are causing me to disable comments on this blog post.

Having to disable comments on your conciliatory blog post is a sign that you should go back and make it more conciliatory.

patio11• 15 years ago

I can't agree here. Nobody owes the world comments, and most particularly they do not owe the Reddit hivemind the opportunity for a good one-minute hate.

philk2• 15 years ago

I agree that nobody owes the world comments but the point of a conciliatory blog post is to make people stop hating you. If they're still hating you to the point where you've had to turn off comments then your post isn't doing its job properly.

(I also agree with your earlier post that if you're selling web hosting for $3/month you'll have to deal with quite a few difficult customers. Often the people who pay the least are the hardest to deal with.)

tptacek2• 15 years ago

Again: enough. These people do not matter. We can stop wasting time talking about them. The travails of people who run into payment problems over $5 web hosting accounts do not constitute "Hacker News". This is a fake controversy. We do not need to evaluate what either side says; neither side matters.

Flagged.

danielsiders• 15 years ago

It's a phenomenal case study in how not to do customer service and social media at a small tech company. I think there are a lot of people in the HN community who could learn a thing or two from this discussion.

khafra• 15 years ago

I'd like to think that the number of HNers who could learn is vanishingly small. I believe the appeal is more along the lines of "Jersey Shore for Internet entrepreneurs."

muppetman• 15 years ago

So because you have the opinion it's faked, you're going to tell the rest of us how we should react and what we find interesting?

Thanks, but I'll make my own choice.

tptacek2• 15 years ago

I don't think it's faked. I think it's a waste of our time. I think this is an unprofessional tin-can web host grappling with an unprofessional penny-ante web site making an amount of noise completely out of proportion to their relevance. Like I said earlier, the only thing any of us have to learn from these people is: "don't be these people".

joshu• 15 years ago

I agree. Some idiots were idiots on the Internet. Why is this interesting to hackers?

akent• 15 years ago

Seems to me like Doug is just digging them deeper.

Vivtek3• 15 years ago

So they're standing by their decision to kill an account because their feelings got hurt, which is already enough to make me doubt their professionalism. But the part that makes me choke is the phrase "the language used by yourself". While it's true that the subjunctive mood can help defuse an emotional situation by deemphasizing the agency of the action, you're doing it wrong. For God's sake, learn English.

tedunangst3• 15 years ago

That's not the subjunctive. You're doing it wrong. For God's sake, learn English.

Vivtek3• 15 years ago

Ha! That's sleep deprivation in action. In my defense, although I manage to misname the passive mode, its usage is known to myself.

strathmeyer2• 15 years ago

One of the tweets they've removed pointed you to their webutation page (http://www.webutation.net/go/review/thiswebhost.com) and bragged that they had 100/100. I remember reading it and wanting to reply, "not anymore..."

mikezupan• 15 years ago

funny thing is any site that isn't putting out spam has a 100/100. no reviews needed

corin_• 15 years ago

Seems to be 40/100 now, guess they would have done better not to link it to people who are going to review them badly...

daniel_iversen• 15 years ago

Get over the issue will you! What's done is done, "sh#t happens"..

I think the company has taken appropriate steps and I for one would like them NOT to fire (but give him a strike on top of what they already have done) the poor nerd why got so frustrated that he used a totally inappropriate tone with clients.

mtogo2• 15 years ago

> the poor nerd why got so frustrated that he used a totally inappropriate tone with clients.

And then canceled the accounts of paying clients, who had done nothing wrong, and deleted all of their information.

rvanniekerk3• 15 years ago

As the Co-founder of a statup that has dealt directly with situations like this in the past, I don't see much wrong with how the situation was handled.

You wouldn't expect a restaurant owner to put up with a rude and insulting customer being a dick to restaurant staff, so why should any other service have to put up with it?

Some customers just aren't worth the hassle they put out PERIOD. I don't give a shit if you're willing to pay me $9.99 a month, if you purposely go out of your way to insult myself or a member of my team, you don't gain the benefit of using our product, end of story.

* Edit * - Just to clarify, I don't see the need for them deleting the previous blog post, if you're going to respond to something in public, you should probably stand behind what you are saying before pushing publish.

starwed2• 15 years ago

This seems to be one of those stories which has mutated.

In the original account, the poster says they inquired about a problem, had their account terminated, and then flipped out.

Almost every commenter on HN seems to assume that the account termination happened after the flip-out, but from what I can tell that isn't correct?

wvenable2• 15 years ago

The fully paid and not in dispute account was suspended (disabled) because of the account owner's twitter comments. The account owner then swore on twitter and so his account was further deleted and all backups destroyed. The story hasn't mutated but the details are subtle.

alex_c• 15 years ago

They had ample opportunity to be the bigger men, but failed to do so at every step.

By all means, terminate troublesome customers, with whatever advance notice you're comfortable / obligated to give them. Remain courteous and professional no matter what they throw at you.

DON'T get in shouting matches with your (ex-)customers over the Internet, or take vindictive measures. It can't be worth it.

tzs• 15 years ago

To use your restaurant analogy, suppose I'm at a restaurant. There is some problem with my credit card. I get rude and insulting.

It is perfectly acceptable, as you note, for the restaurant to toss me out and to ban me.

What is not acceptable is that if a friend of mine later asks them why they banned me for them to state that it was due to a credit card dispute. They should just say "we do not discuss details related to past or present customers".

In the deleted blog post that's essentially what they admit doing. A friend of the customer asked about the incident, and they responded giving information that they should have not given, instead of just saying "we do not discuss account details of customers with third parties".

roel_v• 15 years ago

But now you're turning it around, the nerd rage is not about them giving out that info, since the guy already knew that. The 'ruckus' (rather, Reddit lynch mob) is about them terminating the customer's account. (whether justified or not I don't know and I don't care).

wnight• 15 years ago

> As the Co-founder of a statup that has dealt directly with situations like this in the past, I don't see much wrong with how the situation was handled.

If I saw a service I use unreasonably lock someone's account I'd be concerned for my own. The customer was totally justified in asking their questions, ironically merely seeking assurance for their site.

Instead of telling the customer what they could they imply that it's the customer's fault for even asking because it could involve secret data, and they ridicule the customer for caring - as if they should have just known to shut up and hurry away.

> You wouldn't expect a restaurant owner to put up with a rude and insulting customer being a dick to restaurant staff, so why should any other service have to put up with it?

At a minimum I would expect them to provide the food to-go, and at a discount reflecting the changed nature of the service provided, or to refund the purchase price. That the customer's site and backups got irrevocably nuked doesn't fit into the restaurant analogy at all but just goes how "careless" they are with what could be your data.

However, I would like to call attention to this needless concern trolling. A "dirty word" is not a knife, and is actually a reasonable response to PR shit and corporate excuses.

> Some customers just aren't worth the hassle they put out PERIOD. I don't give a shit if you're willing to pay me $9.99 a month, if you purposely go out of your way to insult myself or a member of my team, you don't gain the benefit of using our product, end of story.

This is a service you provide, if you can't be bothered to do it well don't hide behind your fear of rudeness to dodge complaints.

> "Purposefully go out of your way"

Yes, as if the customer scheduled "Go bug a legit company for no reason".

dulse• 15 years ago

It's amazing to me how incompetent otherwise sophisticated companies are at handling public relations. It's not rocket science, and it's not about who's right.

This post comes off as smug, half-hearted, and insulting. Why are they joking and making light of the technical director's unprofessional conduct? Why are they trying to parse how the customer's twitter comeback wasn't justified? Why are they separating the latter part of the post as the "more serious note," thus implying the first half isn't serious? This is serious for the company, whether they know it or not.

After reading this post, I come away thinking the company doesn't take this situation seriously, they don't take their customers seriously, and they wouldn't handle my problems seriously if I were a customer. They should have 1) Made a direct, unmitigated apology; 2) Clarified what their company stands for regarding terminating accounts with specific policy improvements, not a promise to review the policy; 3) Left the excuses for Jules out of it; 4) Left out the legal threats to people e-mailing the company (the blog post isn't about the company's problems, it's about the customers' problems); 5) Titled it "An Apology" or "A New Direction" or basically anything besides "Moving On..." which sounds like a command being issued in conjunction with an exaggerated eye roll.

Why don't these firms just hire a pr/crisis consultant to help? If they suspect the crisis could cost the company more than a few thousand dollars if not handled correctly, it's a no-brainer. The best-case scenario is that they lose a few thousand dollars improving their public image; the alternative could be losing a chunk of their user base.

larrys• 15 years ago

...see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soup_Nazi

jdoss• 15 years ago

What we have here folks is just another beautiful day in web hosting. The industry is rough at times and both sides, clients/companies sometimes need to step back, relax and hug it out. I would say most issues that erupt into something even a fraction of what this turned into is due to miscommunication between hosting provider and client. That or downtime. Server downtime causes even the sane person to lose it under the right conditions.

hoop• 15 years ago

Customers are sometimes abusive, particularly on support lines. Anyone who works in a service industry needs to learn to deal with that. Even if they don't interact with customers, they should learn the people skills anyhow because really we all have "customers" - even if they are internal to the company.

On the other hand, at $3/mo, I'd say "this" could've gone ahead and terminated the hosting of the "painful" customers (keeping backups,) but only doing so at later date and with notice when everyone wasn't so fired up.

IMO their "technical director" also needs to be let go. Maybe not today, but after they've had a chance to get a new person trained but more importantly get their domains and accounts transferred into the company's (or its owner's) name. The TD has demonstrated that he's over-reactive. If kept with the company, there's the risk that he further damages the company in the future (even with him being isolated away from customers). If he's let go, there's the risk of overreacting and damaging the company in other ways.

martinkallstrom• 15 years ago

The significant line in this blog post is right at the bottom: "Comments are closed."

jgeerts• 15 years ago

For me thiswebhost.com has lost all credibility.

A website is a source of income and just cannot be joked with. As gfunk stated, the fact that it became personal for a company is ridiculous.

You always will have unsatisfied customers and yes sometimes they will curse at your company, but there can be NO reason to terminate a source of income.

lsc4• 15 years ago

From experience, if you screw up and the other guy responds badly, saying "I screwed up, but the other guy responded poorly" is not going to be received as well as just saying "I screwed up."

Only very rarely have I seen more benefit actively defending myself from a customer's accusation rather than apologizing and taking responsibility, even if it was only partly my fault.

pestaa2• 15 years ago

Well, yes, but they felt they need to restore some reputation.

(Or would my post be received better if I just said "Well, yes"? :))

lsc4• 15 years ago

I'm saying that your reputation usually fairs better if you say "I'm sorry for being an asshole" vs. "I'm sorry for being an asshole, but that other guy was also being an asshole"

I mean, the second is usually the case; but as a business, you are expected to be 'the bigger person' and, you know, not delete people's personal data because they are being dicks to you.

Defending your actions, in some minds, makes it sound more likely that you'd do it again in the same situation.

Moving On...

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