
Stay away from This* (thiswebhost.com) - laCour
http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/jk195/stay_the_fuck_away_from_this_thiswebhostcom/
======
Isofarro
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.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> 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.

~~~
alex_c
I actually think it should be a good lesson not to tell people to go fuck
themselves when you still need something from them.

~~~
Vivtek
Remind me not to depend on you ever in any situation where tempers may rise.

~~~
alex_c
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.

~~~
Vivtek
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.

~~~
alex_c
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.

------
patio11
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.

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

~~~
notatoad
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.

------
Hates_
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.

~~~
jarin
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 :)

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

~~~
jarin
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).

------
jrockway
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...

~~~
berfarah
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.

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

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

~~~
techiferous
> 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?

~~~
jrockway
_Why put yourself in hell?_

For the enjoyment of seeing the other party in hell.

------
thirsteh
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."

~~~
Jabbles
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?

~~~
jarin
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.

~~~
ck2
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.

------
corin_
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.

~~~
berfarah
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.

~~~
ck2
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.

~~~
berfarah
Thanks, I'm looking into that.

------
jarin
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).

~~~
samarudge
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 =)

~~~
jsharpe
Isn't "looking after your hardware" _exactly_ what they're responsible for?
Why else are they being paid?

~~~
epochwolf
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?

~~~
samarudge
"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

------
pbhjpbhj
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.

~~~
mtogo
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*.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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.

------
shabble
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?

------
davidandgoliath
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.

------
rmc
_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.

~~~
FeministHacker
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.

~~~
rmc
_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).

------
X4
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.

------
_delirium
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.

------
mikey_p
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.

~~~
tomkr
There's a difference between dropping a client and treating them
disrespectfully. At the very least, the bad publicity isn't worth it.

~~~
X4
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.

~~~
wanorris
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!

~~~
X4
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.

------
cwilson
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.

------
laCour
Latest update from thiswebhost.com:

[http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/the-reddit-
incide...](http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/the-reddit-incident/)

~~~
wanorris
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.

------
amitagrawal
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.

------
ZoFreX
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.

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

1) Most importantly: _They store passwords in plaintext_ and require the last
four char of your password whenever you contact support. I kid you not.

2) Almost as important: They _shut down customers_ when they disagree with
them politically — this is a Salt Lake City outfit, and therefore extremely
anti-gay, and you will be paying people who take down pro-LGBT websites simply
for being pro-LGBT.

3) Terrible tech documentation (they "support" Rails but it’s quite difficult
to actually use).

------
mbrzuzy
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.

------
Shenglong
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.

------
praptak
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".

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

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

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

------
joshu
Do we really need a third thread about this?

------
samstave
BOFH much.

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

~~~
jdelsman
You are assuming he's a grown man.

~~~
burgerbrain
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?

------
leon_
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.

------
innes
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.

~~~
laCour
<https://twitter.com/berfarah> & <https://twitter.com/boriskourt>

~~~
innes
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.

~~~
jarin
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.

~~~
AlexC04
and on that $2.95 your profit is $1.50 a month ... that doesn't buy a lot of
"taking shit".

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

------
kassak
:)

------
atourino
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.

~~~
savramescu
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.

