17 ms·

Ghost.org deleted my website

• ColinWright 6y ago
  I don't think either party comes out especially well here, but my sympathies lie with the CEO. The only thing I might have done differently would be to include a tarball of the site in the "Sorry it was not a good fit" email, thereby avoiding the accusation of wasted work. If I'm providing a service and someone has a problem with it, I expect them to look to resolve it with me first, before tweeting about "shady practices". Added in edit: People seem to think I believe the CEO acted well and that I'm defending him. I don't, and I'm not. But neither party comes out well from this, and I can see why the CEO acted as he did, even if I think it was flawed.
  • andybak 6y ago
    Really? I'm rather gobsmacked to find someone defending this.
    • phinnaeus 6y ago
      I think OP comes across as a bit of an asshole. They send a fairly confrontational email and didn't even wait for a response before taking their dirty laundry to Twitter. I disagree with Ghost taking down the site without more discussion, but I do think their original practice of giving the user the benefit of the doubt and allowing the use of upgraded features without upfront payment to be generally good. I think OP's complaint could probably be addressed through the UI (though I don't know what that looks like presently).
    • ColinWright 6y ago
      I'd be interested to hear more ... why do you find this so surprising? People running businesses are constantly told "Keep good customers, identify and get rid of toxic ones." That appears to be exactly what the CEO has done here. As I say elsewhere, rightly or wrongly he has decided that this customer will be more trouble than they are worth, so he has refunded his money and terminated the service. To me the indefensible thing is not returning the customers data, but other than this, why do you find it so unreasonable that a vendor should choose to terminate a service? It seems to be in the Ts and Cs of every (nearly) service I use. So on that basis, can you explain why you think the CEOs behaviour is indefensible?
      • capableweb 6y ago
        > "Keep good customers, identify and get rid of toxic ones." This quote right here doesn't mean that if someone is saying "you have a good service" or "you have a terrible service" once is "good customer" vs "toxic customer". One message doesn't allow you to extrapolate the full situation, what if the user was simply having a bad day? Now, if you have a user that constantly is being a drain on customer support or otherwise ruins the business, sure, go ahead. But just because you send one email about the pricing and bitch a bit on Twitter, you get your service terminated? That's super petty, and not at all what I would expect of a company like Ghost.
        • vntok 6y ago
          Customers who immediately try to raise a mob on social media whenever they encounter the slightest issue are toxic customers, there's no way around it. There should be a list of such customers for companies to filter them out of their business when possible, ideally at signup. I know multiple small companies that would gladly pay for this service. Market for a new startup?
          • Talanes 6y ago
            Blame all the big corporations who provide minimal customer service through anything except getting their attention on Twitter.
        • ColinWright 6y ago
          I think the CEO stepped in and made a judgement that the customer was not going to be worth it. I'm not saying the call was the right one. Everyone here seems to think I believe the CEO acted perfectly correctly and that I'm defending him. I don't, and I'm not. I'm saying both parties come out of this looking bad, but I can at least understand the CEOs actions, and even if I don't actually approve of them, I have some sympathy.
        • ColinWright 6y ago
          BTW: I suspect we are not far apart here, the difference might be in the nuance. We both believe the termination without warning was petty, we both believe that there are such things as "bad" customers and "toxic" customers. We both believe that both parties behaved badly. The question is whether either or both deserve any sympathy. But more importantly ... what lessons should we take from this? * As a customer? * As a provider?
  • searchableguy 6y ago
    I would have simply ignored the tweet instead of attending it in a rude manner. Many people rage tweet and it's expected when they are frustrated. If Sundar Pichai started banning hners for everytime they compain about Google here, half of HN would lose access to google services.
    • gregoriol 6y ago
      Don't ignore the tweet: yes people may be unhappy, but it's an opportunity to offer an explanation and a solution! Then you can win a happy customer, and also "win" the internet (ie. many more customers) as the tweet is going to stay and be found through search
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • anpago 6y ago
        Agreed, a complaint is a gift can help you in so many ways. Often better than never knowing why a customer just upped and left.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  • mavhc 6y ago
    That's the difference between being a company and a person. The threshold for an entity taking money for a service to be publically highlighted is lower than for a person behaving badly
  • wrren 6y ago
    Yeah, I'd also side with the CEO in terms of his Twitter reply, but not with shutting the site down. I think the OP going to complain on Twitter is going overboard; it's not as though he didn't get any warning at all before being upgraded and he is using features that he's expected to pay for.
  • capableweb 6y ago
    Yeah, neither party looks good here, but my sympathies doesn't lie with Ghost (nor the CEO). The user complained about something, then the company deleted his content? Feels like it's missing something in the middle. Why would Ghost simply delete his website because he's complaining? Feels like they are making the decision for him, instead of just leaving things as they are, and if the user doesn't upgrade, then they don't. > If I'm providing a service and someone has a problem with it, I expect them to look to resolve it with me first, before tweeting about "shady practices". Yeah, you might want to readjust your expectation if you ever end up running a service on the internet. This happens _constantly_ and if you start feeling you need to delete users content when this happens, then please don't run a service for public usage.
    • ColinWright 6y ago
      I think the thing in the middle is taking to Twitter to complain immediately, rather than giving the company time to respond. One piece of advice constantly given to people who run businesses is to delete/remove/get rid of problem customers. In this case the CEO has decided - rightly or wrongly - that this customer is likely to be more trouble than they are worth. So the CEO has refunded his money and terminated the service. What's wrong is simply deleting the data/site. All the data should have been returned to the (now ex-)customer. > ...please don't run a service for public usage. I run multiple services, and I expect people to give me a chance to resolve problems before taking to Twitter. If they don't then I contact them to express my disappointment that they haven't done so, and then I have, on occasion, refunded people, returned their data, and terminated their service. Admittedly my communities aren't the public in general, but I do have some relevant experience. Comments here are clearly divided, and it gives me pause to consider how many people are commenting as those who have, and those who have never, had to deal with customers.
      • capableweb 6y ago
        > I think the thing in the middle is taking to Twitter to complain immediately What I meant is that flow of the events seem to have been something like: - User received notification about impeding upgrade - User replies to Ghost and tweets about the event - CEO replies on Twitter - ??? (Here it feels like some information is missing) - Ghost terminates the users service I cannot fathom that a user complains once via Twitter, and Ghost terminates their account. Has to be something else that have happened, otherwise this is way beyond crazy to do (from Ghosts side) > I run multiple services, and I expect people to give me a chance to resolve problems before taking to Twitter. If they don't then I contact them to express my disappointment that they haven't done so, and then I have, on occasion, refunded people, returned their data, and terminated their service. Same here, with lots of people complaining about bunch of different things and I have never, paying user or not, terminated their service unless I've asked before if I can terminate it or not. Interesting to see that there are others who simply terminate users service when the user complains (gives feedback), wonder how that impacts the bottom line?
  • spiderfarmer 6y ago
    Fully agree. Both parties should have handled it better, but I can understand the CEO. Entitled customers who immediately complain on social media are people you should avoid whenever possible.
  • 55555 6y ago
    Same and there are costs involved in hosting and automatically billing for bandwidth is generally preferred by customers to shutting down the site when it goes viral. It's also the standard in the industry. If you link a credit card and agree to a pay-for-what-you-use plan, then yeah, you'll pay for what you use.
    • oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
      I can see very strong use cases for each approach - can it not be an option? I mean, if the advice is "just keep an eye on it and cut the service yourself once you get close to the limit" then surely "how about I throw you a dollar a month to do that for me, since it's far more efficient that way?" seems reasonable. The people who are at most risk here are those with the least means - it just seems quite unnecessarily unfair.
  • yokto 6y ago
    The tweet doesn't contain the "shady practices" wording you quote. Critising is normal when you have a bad experience and if you don't expect it, you're going to be very very disappointed when you launch a product that actually has a few users.
    • fastball 6y ago
      You are correct, "shady practices" is wording from his email, not his tweets. His tweets say things like: > How can it be fiercely independent publishing and a "non-profit" with such practices? and > Ghost operates a very sleazy "auto upgrade" practice.
  • xenihn 6y ago
    This is indefensible, and terrible for Ghost's reputation. Both you and the CEO should be groveling. This was a huge mistake. Please think of the actual engineers, designers, and everyone else who works on this product, who are probably facepalming over this. What a horrible representation of one's work. Hopefully you can still sympathize with them, along with the customer. (The withholding and potential destruction of data and IP, not the tweeting).
  • OJFord 6y ago
    Agreed, both appear unprofessional here, I don't sympathise with either any more than two children I might walk past bickering in a playground. Instead of emailing about 'shady business practices' off the bat, why not just ask the question? 'Please limit my account to the features of tier X rather than autoupgrade me'. Instead of tweeting, wait for an email response. Then if necessary, again just ask the question: 'uh, what if it goes viral and I break 100k limit too?'. Then the CEO, well, why's he even getting involved, just ignore it. If he must reply on Twitter, why not just answer the question about what happens on the 100k limit? Why not apologise that autoupgrade wasn't desired and say (even if bullshit) you're grateful for the feedback and it'll be reviewed? Certainly don't start calling customers 'asshole's on the internet. But.. the tweet seemingly had no traction (so maybe it didn't matter!) but what was 'what are you on about [...] asshole' even supposed to achieve? Just seems so petty, on both sides...
    • vntok 6y ago
      The CEO of Ghost did not ever call his ex-customer an asshole, though.
      • ColinWright 6y ago
        In the quoted tweet in the submitted post the CEO says: > "Kicking a screaming on Twitter doesn't actually accomplish anything other than making you look like an asshole."
        • vntok 6y ago
          Exactly.
          • gilrain 6y ago
            You're playing semantics and it's making you look like a pedantic loser. I know you won't take offense to this, because I never called you a pedantic loser. Is this correct?
  • dkersten 6y ago
    > If I'm providing a service and someone has a problem with it, I expect them to look to resolve it with me first, before tweeting about "shady practices". That’s just someone being frustrated. Maybe its not the right thing to do and a bit rash, but that you will have a few frustrated customers act rash is part of being in business. It doesn’t make the guy look great, but its still not a reason for the CEO to say he looks like an asshole (which IMHO makes him look just as bad, for the same reasons the customer looks bad, as you described it) and then cancel his account without warning (which is just outright an asshole move).
    • ColinWright 6y ago
      I agree entirely that it's wrong for the CEO to tweet that the customer looks like an asshole, and I agree entirely that simply terminating the account without further warning or interaction is wrong. I'm not defending the CEO, and I never said that I was. I'm saying that I have some sympathy for them. Clearly a lesson I need to take away from this is that expressing sympathy for someone is taken ipso facto as complete agreement. So let's say again, neither party comes out looking good, I think both parties have behaved less well than they should, and the CEO should not have terminated the account without more interaction. But I have more sympathy for the CEO than the customer, which is not the same as saying that I agree with their actions, nor that I support them.
      • dkersten 6y ago
        That sounds reasonable.
  • codegeek 6y ago
    Both parties handled it with emotion and childishness. The CEO should not have acted the way he did. No excuses for what he did. I wanted to be careful before blaming OP but after reading his blog post, he did not send a polite email to begin with and then on top of that, he immediately complained on Twitter and even accused them of shady practice. He went too far. Sorry OP, an email that starts with "This is an extremely shady business practice and makes me question my commitment to moving to Ghost" is NOT a polite email, whether you are right or wrong. A Polite email would have been "I am a little surprised receiving this email from you guys and wasn't aware of this rule you guys have. Can I get more time to think about this since I am not sure I want to pay that kind of money" etc etc. On top of that, OP says "I also decided to tweet about it - because that’s what people do, right?". No OP. People don't do that by default. Good customers try to work it out with the business first. They wait for a first response. They give them a little benefit of doubt before making judgements. If you cannot resolve it together in a friendly way and you feel you have been wronged, go ahead and rant on Twitter by all means. But it was a knee jerk reaction on OP's part to post on twitter which accused Ghost. No business likes these types of customers. Of course, the CEO had an equally if not worse response and now Ghost deserves all the negative press. This doesn't absolve OP's immature reaction. I cannot agree with their tactic.
    • lovehashbrowns 6y ago
      Why is a company entitled to having customers that give the benefit of the doubt, try to work out something, and act in private before making public statements? The owner of the blog felt like the billing update was shady, sent an email, and complained harshly on Twitter. Regardless of the harshness of the tweet, that is literally a customer wanting to work something out and providing feedback. It's what every company should want. It's even better than working it out privately because Twitter is a public platform that ghost can utilize to make their customer service look better. "We have given you a free 30-day upgrade so you have more time to think about this. In the meantime, we will take your feedback into consideration and discuss this internally. Thank you for being a loyal customer" or whatever corporate-speak ghost wants to partake in. Cutting the customer off completely, knowing full well that they will then talk about this publicly, is not only the complete opposite of working things out professionally, but works against ghost's public image. This is the exact kind of customer a company wants. They go public with complaints that can be easily fixed and remedied. It's the easiest form of free goodwill.
• klelatti 6y ago
  Just to point out that Ghost is of course open source so that it should be possible to continue using Ghost but self hosted (always assuming that he still had the relevant assets).
  • oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
    That's useful general info, but I don't think it will help the original author who is a self-described 'non-coder'.
• phanindra_veera 6y ago
  unacceptable
  • willpegan 6y ago
    Disagree, everyone wants to earn high wages but get everything for free. You can’t have it both ways. Neither party looks good, but freeloaders complaining about having to pay is worse.
    • oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
      They weren't a freeloader, they were paying $36/month.
    • tinco 6y ago
      He was paying and he was not complaining about having to pay.
    • willpegan 6y ago
      Sorry, I didn’t see the detail about them already being on a plan
• fastball 6y ago
  I think the Ghost response should've been toned down a lot, but I also disagree with the author that the initial behavior was "shady". There are loads of services that charge you when you use more than the pre-defines limits of your current pricing tier and don't just shut you down. That's not shady at all. I don't think I've ever seen anyone else complain [edit]that this is sleazy[/edit] for any service, much less Ghost.
  • tchaffee 6y ago
    People complain about this all the time. AWS is the most common example that comes to mind.
    • fastball 6y ago
      You're right, I meant complain that it is "shady" or "sleazy". People get annoyed by a lack of hard limits you can set, but it's not "shady" – you are literally paying for your usage of the product. It's not like they're making you pay for something you're not using (which is when I would start to call something "shady").
      • tchaffee 6y ago
        I consider AWS' almost indecipherable usage billing to be shady. I very much doubt I'm alone. It's next to impossible to predict your AWS usage bill for anything beyond a very basic setup. What's annoying is the solution is a simple radio button: bill me for what I use or stop my service when I go over limits. Who does it benefit to not have that hard limit? The customer or business? The answer is why it feels shady.
        • fastball 6y ago
          AWS isn't psychic. They don't know what you're going to use, so of course they can't predict what it will cost. Their fees are out there in the open, if you know how much you are going to use AWS it is actually trivially to calculate how much it will cost you. They even have price calculators. Also, not having an option doesn't mean a company has intentionally done that because it benefits them.
• Jabbles 6y ago
  6 days ago HN discussed the article "Fire your bad customers": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24097420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24097420 It is interesting to see this in practice, and see this from the customer's point of view. Obviously they do not believe they are "bad".
  • tchaffee 6y ago
    Why was he a bad customer? He was frustrated. And he exaggerated what he was frustrated about. That could have lead to an insightful conversation that improved the product. Don't make the mistake of thinking every frustrated customer is a bad one.
    • Zanni 6y ago
      Yes and no. A customer who complains to you is doing you a favor by letting you know how your product fell short of their expectations. That's an opportunity to either 1) improve the product or 2) clarify the customer's expectations. But a customer who takes their grievance to social media immediately is a troublemaker who's not worth the grief. The CEO was right to "fire" him as a customer (but he should have been civil about it and not deleted his work without notice).
      • tchaffee 6y ago
        Plenty of good customers take a grievance to social media immediately. We are emotional animals. If you are using angry tweets as your signal for what makes a bad customer, you're going to lose a lot of good customers to the competition willing to see past the initial emotions and get to the root of the problem. Solving your customers' problems is pretty much what keeps you in business.
        • dependenttypes 6y ago
          Taking grievances to social media immediately is generally wise because it is often the only way to solve an issue (sadly). In addition it warns the other potential customers of the issue.
• drenvuk 6y ago
  "fairly polite" email, eh? That's actually a very reasonable business practice of asking then charging instead of just making a site go dark. The Ghost CEO should have taken the higher road and there's no excuse for expunging your site but you were definitely being a dick first. I won't be using Ghost and I would try to avoid having you as a customer as well.
  • dijit 6y ago
    I don’t think the argument was that he wanted the site to go dark. The author wanted them to block out offending features until the account was upgraded with purpose. Maybe an upsell screen overlay when he tried to add another staff member. “To add more staff you need to upgrade your account, upgrade with 1 click here” I don’t agree that it’s “shady” but you can already tell that it would negatively affect conversion to directly inform people of what they’re doing, rather than waiting for them to do it and then automatically upgrading them. If you charge on some unknown, like requests per second, then it’s better to allow the user to set an upper bound on finances anyway.
    • masklinn 6y ago
      > I don’t agree that it’s “shady” but you can already tell that it would negatively affect conversion to directly inform people of what they’re doing, rather than waiting for them to do it and then automatically upgrading them. "shady" is an understatement, not an overstatement. "If we auto-upgrade, there will be people who miss it or will be too apathetic or procrastinating to fix it, therefore better conversion rates" is on the bad side of "shady".
    • drenvuk 6y ago
      How else am I supposed to read his tweet? He asked what happens if his site goes viral directly after asking for the extra users feature to be blocked. I think it's ridiculous to look for some finely grained charging scheme from a start up.
    • masonic 6y ago
      “To add more staff you need to upgrade your account, upgrade with 1 click here” Can a Ghost user comment as to what you are told in the process of adding a rate-exceeding feature? Does it warn you that "this will result in a category upgrade if it persists over 7 days" or whatever?
• dazhbog 6y ago
  This CEO needs to learn how to take criticism like the BBC rice lady.
  • sbierwagen 6y ago
    Googling, apparently this refers to https://www.intheknow.com/2020/07/31/a-bbc-cooks-upsetting-rice-recipe-is-stirring-controversy-online/ https://www.intheknow.com/2020/07/31/a-bbc-cooks-upsetting-r...
• simplyinfinity 6y ago
  Oh wow, that's some very bad practices. Kicking out a user who criticizes you a bit about something shady is ought to not end well (in PR point of view) I had similar experience with New Relic. They don't restrict you on the amount of agents you add based on what you pay, so you have to manually purchase licenses for agents. So by a mistake we were paying for 3-4 agents but were using 6-7. A year later we get a email from sales guy "pay us 10k or sign a 1 year contract for our services" We ditched them a day before our contract ended. Would never use them again.
  • Hamuko 6y ago
    That doesn't sound at all bad. You were using more resources than you were paying for and they asked you to upgrade afterwards. I'm assuming that they didn't force you to automatically upgrade.
    • simplyinfinity 6y ago
      They basically forced us to sign a contract. They didn't implement any resource usage checks, so you could use more than you were paying for, without any notification of excess usage. They do this so they can force retain customers. Any normal company that has usage based pricing sends you the actual bill at the end of the month. Not in this case. In this case you (the customer) have to monitor your own usage and buy licenses dynamically leaving a huge room for error since there are 0 warnings/limits "you are using more than you are paying", when this can be achieved by the system itself.
    • luckylion 6y ago
      > That doesn't sound at all bad. "Wait for a year until the bill is high enough instead of telling them after a week that they probably have missed adding those licences and it's going to cost them $x more if they wish to keep using those extra users". Yeah, sounds not bad at all.
      • Hamuko 6y ago
        I don't think New Relic does retroactive charging. I think we were using more New Relic resources than we had paid for by accident and nothing really came out of it. We just fixed the issue and continued with the plan.
• webkike 6y ago
  Neither side looks good here, but it sure is bad business for ghost to do this, it kinda makes me immediately exclude using their services for anything.
• ramino 6y ago
  I can’t understand the CEO’s decision. This is valuable feedback on their practices. Yes the customer is angry but that should be okay! Imagine if professionals in other areas would behave the same (like doctors for example)... Behavior like this will lead to customers being scared to criticize Ghost. This is the opposite of what the team at Ghost should want. Someone should not be regarded as a bad customer for complaining once. A bad customer should be defined as someone who over a longer time frame costs resources. And also only after talking to them and not being able to find common ground.
• arcatek 6y ago
  People finding sympathy in the CEO behavior should make an effort to remember the number of time they likely ranted about their landlords / network provider / post service / bank service / ... on Twitter. How would you have reacted if they had decided to ban you without even letting you take back your assets? Closing a customer's account without following procedures, on the CEO's whims, just because they don't feel comfortable with your practices, with a passive aggressive "sorry it wasn't a good fit for you!", deleting data in the process, is extremely unprofessional. There's no good light for this. In fact, the following story is a great example of the danger of this kind of practices: https://www.newsweek.com/bank-closes-accounts-criticizes-twitter-1480651 https://www.newsweek.com/bank-closes-accounts-criticizes-twi...
  • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    I do sympathise with their CEO on a personal level - but that's that: a personal level[1]. When your twitter account is not only public, but the public-facing twitter account of the CEO of a company: it should never contain "personal" messages that haven't been run by a PR team, otherwise SNAFUs like this will happen. Save the customer rants and banter for Slack or the morning standup - not Twitter. Egads. You'd think everyone would have learned from Elon Musk's example by now, surely? [1] ...and even then I'm onlyy sliiiightly sympathetic, and ultimately I'm still siding with the article's author, provided they're being truthful. It was wrong for Ghost to unilaterally delete their content and retaliate against their user. They turned a possible PR victory (by acceding to the author's requests and upgrading their account for free (given the marginal cost of each user is negligible, giving a service credit doesn't cost them anything) into a disaster. Eeejits.
    • dylan604 6y ago
      >You'd think everyone would have learned from Elon Musk's example by now, surely? How has it hurt Musk? If I was looking for justification, Musk and POTUS have pretty much laid the groundwork for spew whatever via Twitter does not hurt the brand. It only makes it more visible.
      • 6y ago
• Jabbles 6y ago
  I am confused; what is a "staff user"? Does the UI allow you to add them without saying "2 is your limit"? The CEO tweeted that the traffic doesn't matter, but the email clearly says they are limited to 100k views. What's going on?
  • heythere22 6y ago
    > The CEO tweeted that the traffic doesn't matter, but the email clearly says they are limited to 100k views. What's going on? There are two restrictions on the plan: traffic and users. So if you are over one of the limits, you have to upgrade. And OP has one user too much for the lower plan
    • masonic 6y ago
      OP has one user too much Actually, double (4 users, 2 allowed under plan).
  • woutr_be 6y ago
    The email says that OP is using 4 staff users, where his plan only allows for 2. So the CEO is correct in saying this had nothing to do with traffic. Staff users are the same as team members. Why OP was allowed to create more staff users than his plan allowed is kinda strange.
    • DrScump 6y ago
      Why OP was allowed to create more staff users than his plan allowed is kinda strange. Not at all. You have two staff users. You need to replace one. This allows you to create the replacement before having to delete the one being replaced. Quite friendly, actually.
      • Hamuko 6y ago
        I don't know why it's such a burden to be asked to disable one user before adding another.
      • 6y ago
• maeln 6y ago
  My bank provide me with a "e-card" functionality (I can create virtual VISA card with a definite amount of money on it). It is so useful to deal with this new trend of automatically opt-in subscription. If you try to charge me without my consent, the card will just block. Some company even try to send their collection people at me, but I usually remind them that those shady contract where you pay more without any confirmation on your side won't stand in a European court :)
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• tvbuzz 6y ago
  Calling Ghost ‘shady’ is not ‘polite’. It’s rude. Good lesson for anyone looking for trouble.
  • emj 6y ago
    He doesn't call anyone shady, it's the practice of billing someone 3 times the amount of the last bill with just 7 days notice is shady. Not reading emails for 7 days is standard for me at least, I try to be effective with my own time.
    • jasonvorhe 6y ago
      The same argument doesn't work for your physical inbox, right?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• tilolebo 6y ago
  "I also decided to tweet about it - because that’s what people do, right?" I honestly don't know what to think about this. On one hand I understand you want to create awareness on a practice you consider as shady,ok. But from what I know, Ghost usually try to please its customers. It's a small team with hardworking members, competing against giants. Attacking them on Twitter before they could even reply to your email: kind of a dick move.
  • tilolebo 6y ago
    Just to be clear: the CEO deleting the customer's site is absolutely not okay. It would also make me reconsider using their service.
  • 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
    That's fair, but I also think the CEO unsubscribing him and revoking his access in the way that he did was a dick move.
    • wyclif 6y ago
      This is how I think about it as well. Two dick moves by opposing parties means it's probably not true that only one of them was justified. IOW, they were probably both wrong in the way they handled it.
      • luckylion 6y ago
        ... but to very different degrees. Like somebody calling another person an asshole and them pulling out a gun and shooting them in response. Yeah, don't go around insulting people, but let's not pretend that it's anywhere close to equally wrong. People are getting trained by Google and other SV companies that you only get support if you can get x retweets. I don't like it, but I understand why people react to that by tweeting out their issues with companies. And, of course, opt-out upgrade is shady.
        • wyclif 6y ago
• elliotpage 6y ago
  I agree with the post author that the tactic of allowing users to exceed plan limits and then upping their bill (yes, even with the 7 day notice email) is shady. I hate this kind of behaviour from my tools - it feels like I am constantly being watched for when I "slip" and can be charged more without recourse. If you are going to use this behavior, provide a switch to enable hard limits on usage so a user cannot blunder unto having their budget blown by accident. Edit: Also, why does the CEO have direct access to cancel user accounts and send them direct messages? Surely they have more important things to do?
  • crispyporkbites 6y ago
    In many alternative scenarios you hit a sudden spike in traffic that could make your business thousands and the hosting company starts blocking people from accessing your site because you exceeded the quota. 7 day notice of upgrading seems much more reasonable in that case
    • mhaberl 6y ago
      That is fine IF you warn your customer about scaling BEFORE the customer gives you the credit card. This system does make sense for some customers, it does not for others, some will agree and subscribe to the service, some will not.
      • DanBC 6y ago
        > That is fine IF you warn your customer about scaling BEFORE the customer gives you the credit card. Ghost is pretty clear on their signup pages. For example, if you go over your traffic limits: https://ghost.org/pricing/ https://ghost.org/pricing/ > Average views per month > Views refer to the number of requests to your site each month. These are tracked much like an analytics 'pageview' - and are incremented with each page or API request. > We never disable sites for traffic spikes, so no need to worry about the front page of Reddit or HN. If you exceed your limit consistently on a 3 month rolling average, we'll just let you know that you need to upgrade. And for staffing: > Staff users > Staff users refers to the total number of active team members invited to Ghost Admin whom you collaborate with. For the purposes of billing, we only count staff users who have logged in at least once in the last 30 days. > If you have lots of authors of posts who are not logging into Ghost Admin on a regular basis, they won't count towards your plan limits. And if you don't want to upgrade they tell you how to avoid it before charging.
• tchaffee 6y ago
  Frustrated customers, even rude ones, are an opportunity to learn and improve. The CEO of Ghost unfortunately resorted to schoolboy tactics instread of acting like a diplomatic executive. Sure you should fire your bad customers. But don't mistake a frustrated customer for a bad one. They are not the same.
  • emsy 6y ago
    This. The customer is upset because he was wronged and he’s going to be frustrated. If you’re going to fire every rude customer you’re quickly out of business. People point out that „both sides are in the wrong“. But the extent to which they are wrong is different.
    • robertlagrant 6y ago
      Also, he wasn't rude. The responses were.
      • emsy 6y ago
        You’re right I edited the comment.
    • lilSebastian 6y ago
      > The customer is upset because he was wronged and he’s going to be rude At which point was the customer rude here?
      • emsy 6y ago
        Yes rude is the wrong word I‘ll edit it to make it more accurate (I’m no native speaker, sorry)
      • theevilsharpie 6y ago
        > At which point was the customer rude here? The customer was a little aggressive in their opening email when they described Ghost's business practices as shady, but I'd still consider it in-bounds for a professional email. Then, before Ghost's support had a chance to engage with this customer, the customer publicly tweeted about the problem in a way that implied that Ghost was intentionally ripping off customers. I would encourage anyone reading this to stop for a moment and think back to the projects they've worked on, either for an employer or as a side project. How many of those projects explicitly aimed to defraud paying customers? Even a single one? Now, how many of those projects had to deal with customers that rudely complained about something that ended up being a misunderstanding on their part, or were simply abusing the support staff as a way of getting a refund or some other type of free service? Practically everyone who has ever had to deal with any type of customer support has encountered that behavior -- "Karen" caught on as a widely-understood stereotype for a reason. Ghost's CEO likely reacted the way he did because he has enough experience to quickly categorize customers who reach out for support, and concluded (probably correctly) that this customer would continue to be unreasonable, would end up being a net drain on both revenue and team morale, and that refunding the customer and banning their account would be the quickest and least distracting way forward. I can't fault Ghost here. Dealing with people that immediately drag your name through the mud for every perceived slight is exhausting, and for a low-fee service like Ghost, can very quickly erase whatever margin they may be making. And frankly, as someone that's tired of the increasingly polarized and hateful discourse on social media these days, it's refreshing to see a business that's willing to clamp down on incivility, even if it means lost revenue.
• anpago 6y ago
  A good example, where biting your tongue then steping outside. Before pressing send for all parties was probably a wise lesson.
• jonny383 6y ago
  Ghost flopped in its attempts to unseat WordPress / Medium, and they've had how many years? I'd be cranky if I were the CEO too.
  • captn3m0 6y ago
    My running-theory is that it will remain this way until ghost's OSS version supports multi-tenancy properly: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/issues/1484 https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/issues/1484 Wordpress took off, because you could support multiple sites for various clients with a single-stack - enabling third-parties to run Wordpress-hosting websites easily. With Ghost, unless you are Ghost.com, you need to run one-container per blog you have, which is ridiculous.
    • bishalb 6y ago
      Not just that but the cheap shared hostings offering dirt cheap setups to run wordpress sites on. And ghost honestly is not as feature rich and customizable as wordpress. WordPress is a full blown cms and so much more than a blogging platform.
• Normille 6y ago
  The moral of the story is; host your own stuff on your own server and stop giving Ghost, Medium, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter... etc. etc. the power to decide what gets published on the internet.
  • Wronnay 6y ago
    Yeah - and being in control is also cheaper than these expensive subscriptions ...
  • codegeek 6y ago
    That is not the moral of the story. Not everyone is a developer or a dev ops person or someone who can run a few linux commands to setup on their own. The moral of the story is to be reasonable with people and not be a dick. In this case, both parties were childish and I would not want to deal with either of them.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• lasky 6y ago
  need to add to their TOS: “if we think you are a dick we reserve the right to make emotionally overreactive decisions like canceling and refunding your account” also, to OP.. maybe try being nicer ?
• exnuber 6y ago
  So, if I follow this correctly... You sign up for a service, choose an account type that has restrictions, you exceed those, they have a soft limit with known and communicated consequences, they reach out how to avoid the consequence, you do nothing, and now you are angry? What else should the company have done? Remove your additional accounts that exceeded the limits? Or, just allow over-usage without consequence? It's totally unclear what you think should have happened. I think the CEO actually responded very adequately. The owner of postapathy went over limits, they notified, and when no action was taken, their account are suspended, how is that not fair?
  • solidasparagus 6y ago
    Why would the company allow you to exceed these limits? We aren't talking about traffic here, just how many accounts they were able to have. When Netflix says you're allowed to watch two screens at once so you can share an account with family, isn't it unreasonable for Netflix to allow you to watch on three screens and then tell you your bill has doubled? At a minimum, the CEO should have: emailed the customer telling them that the policies are non-negotiable and that the customer is free to disable accounts, increase the amount they pay, or cancel their subscriptions after the 7 days grace period ends. That is just basic professionalism. What you really should do is address the core problem of how did a user get more accounts than their billing allowed - either grandfather them in if the price model changed or add a feature that prevents a user from exceeding their two allocated staff accounts (again we aren't talking about traffic, this is how many admin accounts the customer is allowed to have).
  • Hates_ 6y ago
    It says that they believe they shouldn't be allowed to add users if their service level doesn't allow it. What's not clear from the article is how the extra charges of adding users is communicated. If you have two users and you attempt to add a third, does the site say "Your plan allows X users. By adding another, your plan you will be upgraded to Y which is $99", or does it say nothing, allow you to perform the action, and hope that you don't notice the email some time in the future. If so then, I see that as a bit of a dark pattern, others may believe that's perfectly acceptable.
• adamzapasnik 6y ago
  Wow, I'm surprised that so many call OP rude or a bad customer. What exactly did OP do wrong? I think his mistake was tagging CEO on Twitter, that's what costed him a website. How many times do you argue with regular employees in a retail shop or over a phone? Obviously, it shouldn't happen, but it happens and you don't get kicked out of a shop. Here OP wasn't happy about auto upgrade, called out CEO on it, got his site deleted, wtf?
  • masonic 6y ago
    When your first response is to shittalk the vendor on social media rather than contact them through normal channels, you're likely to be a net-negative customer. His shitpost tweet timestamp was 07:21; his screenshot of his email says it was sent at 13:29. Maybe time zone accounts for some disparity, but there was certainly no attempt to allow a response before shitposting.
    • adamzapasnik 6y ago
      How exactly was it a shit shit talk? So it's okay to only praise executives over social media, but you can't say anything else? That's stupid.
  • woutr_be 6y ago
    I personally think he could've handled this is in a much nicer way, calling a business shady or saying they screw over clients instantly sets the precedent that you're trying to attack them. If he just asked them what would happen when his website goes viral, I'm sure he would've gotten a proper response. The CEO definitely wasn't as professional as he should've been, but I'm not sure how I would feel when someone calls my business shady or says I'm screwing over clients over what might have been a misunderstanding.
    • adamzapasnik 6y ago
      Well it's is kinda of shady for B2C market, where every cent counts for the customers. There is no way easy way to explain why it's done this way, because it's obviously made on purpose to earn more $$.
• parsimoniousplb 6y ago
  I was once infatuated with the digital nomad "community". One day, I came across a twitter thread where he (the "ceo" of ghost) and other prominent members of that community were engaged in a harassment campaign against customer service representatives of a local airline for delaying one of their flights. What I found particularly revealing was that they used various families with kids that were also waiting as a front for their own complaints, as in "How dare you make these families wait?", when in fact they meant "How dare you make _us_ wait?". I found that pretty gutless, and my admiration for this "community" began to wane as a result. Long story short, I'm not at all surprised questionable business practices and mistreatment of customers sprung from there.
  • searchableguy 6y ago
    Do you have source? I am curious.
  • Hamuko 6y ago
    >engaged in a harassment campaign against customer service representatives of a local airline for delaying one of their flights Did the airline do him right by cancelling and refunding his ticket without being asked to?
    • robjan 6y ago
      Customer service agents aren't your personal punching bag and they usually have limited power to rectify the situation. The person in CS who was receiving that complaint could hardly force the plane to depart.
    • luckylion 6y ago
      ... and leaving them stranded where ever they were, banning them from flying with them again? Most likely not, airlines are staffed with professionals, not emotional teenagers.
• sradman 6y ago
  Irate customers can be a treasure trove of information but indulging irate customers incentivizes some to game the company's goodwill. I think this complaint is of the first variety. Ultimately, the question is how to flexibly enforce the limits associated with tiered plans: strict enforcement vs. flexible limits with e-mail notified auto upgrades. The Ghost CEO should be asking his team if they can improve their current flexible e-mail notified auto upgrade approach.
• zxcvbn4038 6y ago
  CEOs have bad days too. At least it was a human acting with cause and not an algorithm that killed his site with no explanation and no recourse. They gave him his money back instead of holding it forever.
  • asddubs 6y ago
    and the CEO also didn't go their house and shoot them in the face
• matthewfelgate 6y ago
  I hate hate hate hate hate this shady behaviour from web hosting type companies. Fuck them. Fuck fuck fuck them.
  • C19is20 6y ago
    Your double-amended-post reminds me....
• matthewfelgate 6y ago
  I hate hate hate hate hate this shady behaviour from web hosting type companies. Fk them. Fk fk fk them. These are the companies that make life joyless.
• GlitchMr 6y ago
  In my opinion, Ghost made a mistake in terminating the service without prior notice (although I think it would be okay for them to do so with prior notice). The terms of the service allow doing so for any reason, but that's no justification. In fact, having such a term is a good reason to avoid Ghost. Also, I find it interesting that Ghost didn't answer "What happens if an article goes viral and it breaks the 100k views boundary? Automatic charge?" question. The pricing page provides a reasonable response here. > We never disable sites for traffic spikes, so no need to worry about the front page of Reddit or HN. If you exceed your limit consistently on a 3 month rolling average, we'll just let you know that you need to upgrade.
  • searchableguy 6y ago
    > The terms of the service allow doing so for any reason, but that's no justification. In fact, having such a term is a good reason to avoid Ghost. This is a standard condition in most ToS: we can kick you out for any reason whatsoever.
    • GlitchMr 6y ago
      Not really. I checked AWS ToS and it explicitly lists conditions when you can be kicked without prior notice (the illegal content that disrupts or threatens the Services or in accordance with applicable law or any judicial, regulatory or other governmental order or request, repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances). Generally you will have 2 business days to fix violations of AWS policies.
      • nix23 6y ago
        He said "most" not "AWS"
      • searchableguy 6y ago
        I went ahead and checked ToS parts of all the big clouds and you are correct. Most have clauses to notify you before suspending the services unless [disruption]. I checked the consumer subscription services I use and they don't have such clause in theirs.
• brainless 6y ago
  I was on the fence with the author's behavior but I re-read the issue - The author could add a staff member without being on a new plan. This is really shady. If your product has pricing tiers, then PLEASE do not let people get features without accepting to pay in the first place. Here is the pricing page: https://ghost.org/pricing/ https://ghost.org/pricing/ This does not seem like a per-user pricing, which would give Ghost a benefit of doubt. This is clear tiers that consumer has to explicitly buy.
• villgax 6y ago
  Damn I laughed at the entire fiasco & then worried a lot about such tactics near the end.
• kissgyorgy 6y ago
  This is why you should OWN YOUR CONTENT instead of putting it in some randos hand.
  • jasonvorhe 6y ago
    So you're advocating for having people host their stuff in their own data centers with their own uplinks, right?
    • kissgyorgy 6y ago
      Sure a blog needs a data center... but actually, yes. More and more companies using Nextcloud to host their data.
• njsubedi 6y ago
  The CEO needs to see his psychologist. I’m neither being sarcastic nor being provocative, but as a CEO when you find yourself calling your paying customer an asshole and deleting their website over a tweet, it’s time you look back at what you have become. Probably he is in too much stress due to the pandemic, or he has developed too much of a “I’m the CEO, bitch!” attitude. In either case, Ghost as a company should take care of that guy to stay in business.
  • LeonB 6y ago
    Well said. I’m sure he felt justified, but it was an angry/impulsive/self-righteous thing to do. He needs help, particularly for the sake of the other members of the company who rely on him not to act like this.
  • ohgodplsno 6y ago
    Nah. User was an ass, company is in no obligation to keep serving them, kicked them out. You're not entitled to having access to Ghost.org. you can even selfhost if the technology choice is what makes you stay. The only thing Ghost should do is hand him over a backup of his data.
    • libertine 6y ago
      All fine, but surely it doesn't make Ghost look good.
    • clashmeifyoucan 6y ago
      Not really. I'm sure they probably have something in their ToS that covers such kicking but even so, a paying customer is entitled to having access to the site, no? Being unhappy with a service doesn't mean you get your subscription cancelled.
    • benhurmarcel 6y ago
      Right. That doesn't really attract me to host on their service however, if they might just delete your website at any time.
    • 6y ago
• postapathy 6y ago
  Post Apathy OP here - I was definitely being an ass when I first tweeted about it (IIRC, this was after I e-mailed them). I was generally frustrated with some wider issues around building my website so I decided to blow some steam by tweeting about it. I actually thought "that was too harsh" considering I had nothing but praise for how user-friendly Ghost was (and how great Ghost support was - shoutout to Sarah, whoever you are, you shouldn't be there). The one thing you don't expect is that a CEO of a company would take the annoyance of an account with circa.350 followers seriously and respond with what is apparently vitriolic rage, not only cussing me out, but then immediately going to shut my website down even though I was talking to a support rep at Ghost about upgrading and getting migration underway. The main problems are this: 1. An automatic upgrade within 7 days that triples in price is sleazy, there's no two ways to look at it. I don't know if it's an American thing, but in Europe, a company would be crucified for doing this. You always have offer and acceptance before agreeing to something. It would be very easy for Ghost to simply put a popup stating "you cannot add more staff users as you are on the basic plan - please upgrade here to do so". Again, no excuses here, it's clear that some customers are being caught out by these automatic charges, judging by the dozen people that have expressed similar issues with Ghost since I published my post. So much for being a non-profit. 2. Something I forgot to add to the story - the main reason I went over the 2 staff users I was permitted to have on my account was because I had invited Ghost support in as a staff user to help with migration. This made me really annoyed as I had some friends on to help with setting up the website and I had to kick them to avoid being charged triple - for bringing Ghost in to help with some stuff. 3. The CEO going from cussing on twitter to deleting my website (all within 15mins, as I was working on it) is unacceptable, again, from any POV. The people here talking about this being an acceptable practice to deal with "toxic customers" have clearly never actually been in a customer-facing role. You wouldn't last in such a position if you dealt with every disgruntled customer in such a manner. Stop LARPing. Anyway, that's my side. I understand the cynical mood of Hacker News so I won't say more and let the people here make up their own minds. Feel free to subscribe to the Post Apathy newsletter. I promise you it's enriching.
  • arnvald 6y ago
    > An automatic upgrade within 7 days that triples in price is sleazy, there's no two ways to look at it There are two ways to look at it. I use a tool that reports errors in my web app. After one of releases we started receiving a lot of errors and we reached the maximum on our plan. What would the proper response be? To just block all the incoming error reports until end of the month? Or maybe to send me an email saying "hey, you've reached your limit, if this continues we'll upgrade you to higher plan automatically"? There's no clear answer here, that depends on your context (I used the app for work and having proper error reports was more important than the cost for me), but there are two ways to look at it. > respond with what is apparently vitriolic rage not defending CEO's response (it was very inappropriate), aren't you doing the same right now? You're retweeting stuff like "F* Ghost and F* their CEO" with their accounts tagged.
• Havoc 6y ago
  Both parties sound less than reasonable frankly.
• nix23 6y ago
  >I also decided to tweet about it - because that’s what people do, right? This is where he canceled every good outcome from his problems.
• nickjj 6y ago
  The CEO of Ghost has always struck me as weirdly defensive. I remember ~2 years ago he tweeted something about how he was so proud to have built Ghost up with little help from anyone, no funding and was really pushing the angle of how the project is open source. But then I replied with something like "Congrats on all of the success, but what about the thousands of folks who gave you $250,000+ on Kickstarter to help kick start the project?", because he didn't mention that anywhere. He deleted his reply on Twitter since then, but it was pretty hostile and he even left the tweet off with saying he was blocking me. All from that 1 question I asked. Prior to that I've never contacted, messaged or replied to him so this had nothing to do with previous history.
• elmo2you 6y ago
  I don't think there is any excuse for how Ghost.org terminated an account like this. Maybe they have a fancy TOS, but the bottom line here is that they destroyed somebody else's work/investment/value, and apparently only because they didn't like the customer's behavior. In a (functioning) state of law, that should means you've just fucked yourself. Maybe there's more to this story (there often is) and maybe the author is a class act himself, but that shouldn't change that Ghost.org should be liable for doing damage, if that indeed is for no valid reason (as it appears thus far). One thing I do know for certain .. I wouldn't touch this company with a ten feet pole after this .. and if I had been an investor, I'd seriously reconsider that investment.
  • sneak 6y ago
    It’s not a “fancy TOS”. Almost all terms of service for almost every service online reserve the right to terminate service at any time, with or without cause. It’s just like at will employment, or any other voluntary association. Either party can revoke consent at any time. If the customer can close their account at any time without notice, why shouldn’t the operator be able to as well? The service did nothing wrong. They’re not a backup service, and if a customer ends up being more of a headache (either financial, emotional, or simply just time/attention) than the operator deems their custom worth, they have EVERY RIGHT to opt out of future transactions. Furthermore, the customer explicitly agreed to this when they signed up. Even if they hadn’t, though, it is entirely reasonable for either party to the business relationship to be able to say, at any time, “this isn’t working for me, let’s stop.” That’s how consent works in real life outside of business contracts, too.
    • acid__ 6y ago
      Yeah, I agree that ghost likely hasn't violated any business/legal contracts. That said, they've certainly violated an implicit social contract for the behavior expected from service providers of their type. So to say "The service did nothing wrong."... is correct but only in a technical, legally correct sense.
      • sneak 6y ago
• 0xfaded 6y ago
  Geeeze, is complaining on Twitter really the first thing people do these days? What could they possibly hope to get out of it? No, most people do not post on Twitter when first reaching out to support.
  • njsubedi 6y ago
    You can tweet about anything you want people to know about. He thought he needs to tweet that he thinks that Ghost’s practice is shady. How many times people have tweeted that Google’s practices are shady and got their accounts deleted on the whims of Google CEO?
  • jcheng 6y ago
    That line really rubbed me the wrong way too. I think lots of people these days have their self-expression dial turned way up and their empathy dial turned way down.
  • rcxdude 6y ago
    I think you can thank the support practices of large tech companies like google and amazon for this, where kicking up a fuss on social media is literally the only way you can hope to have a human at the company look into it.
• Wronnay 6y ago
  Well, that makes John O’Nolan the Elon Musk of web publishing (from a shitty tweets perspective)
• jasonvorhe 6y ago
  I'd be very interested in their take on this. This is totally unlike John and I'd hope someone on his team would intervene if he were to act in such a manner. But I'm still surprised that someone signs up for a specific plan, exceeds the plan's limitations, gets 7 days off warning, and is then openly complaining about that practice, as if it were the first time a company ever had that business model. You don't sign up for AWS and then don't get to create resources unless you top up your account first. Of course Ghost could add such a feature, but how many of their customers are asking for it? From the looks of it, not many. It's also funny how he was ready to spend hundreds of dollars on his project, but the people who host it, maintain it and make sure it's highly available don't deserve more of his money, despite him exceeding the maximum amount of users of the plan he chose. Instead, he complains about a totally fair warning of 7 days before he even gets charged more. "What if I didn't read my email in 7 days" is like saying that you don't open your physical mailbox regularly and you don't deserve to get a warning for a due invoice. If you do business online, read your mail. I'm curious how John or Ghost will react. I'm sure there's more to this story.
  • Mandatum 6y ago
    The pricing doesn't scale linearly, this is an upgrade because he exceeded single metric (staff users). If it scaled linearly, it would have gone from $29 to $43.50 - not $99. This practice is a dark pattern. There isn't a single mainstream service out there that pulls this type of shit without catching flak for it - the likes of AT&T, etc. This is a poorly implemented feature where they claim to "Only pay for what you actually use, never worry about traffic spikes"[0] .. but you have to read into each plan to see the other metrics this applies to. Works great for users who over-subscribe but terribly for those who don't. Ghost should be doing this manually for users who don't exceed their bandwidth caps - there's no charge for them, and they're just going to be eating any good will they had from the community (which up until recently was pretty good). Just bar access to additional staff accounts. They're being called out for poor tiering and upgrade practices, the 7 day notice is laughable when they even talk about 3 month rolling averages in the front. [0]https://ghost.org/pricing/ https://ghost.org/pricing/
• Illniyar 6y ago
  This is a SaaS business, kicking someone out of the service because of something he said once on twitter is beyond ridiculous. This shouldn't ever have been a thought that crosses his mind. The CEO has done massive harm to his company's reputation. The customer was also right, IMO. The practice of not stopping you from service if you go over your limits and than charging you is a good one, but only for things the user can't control - traffic is a good example. For a limit a user actively needs to exceed - such as number of users - there should always be a warning at the very least. Not doing so is shady.
  • nacs 6y ago
    On top of that, the CEO of Ghost (John O'Nolan) publicly calling a paying customer an "ahole" is completely unacceptable.
• nix23 6y ago
  What i really don't get, for 36$ you can get a dedicated server with 32GB Ram a 8 coreXeon a 256GB SSD and 2x2TB HDD and unlimited Bandwith...why the hell would anyone pay so much for just a nodeJS-SaaS?
  • arnvald 6y ago
    Because not everyone wants to manage their server. I use paid Ghost plan and I know I could save like $200/y by using my own hosting, but I want to just focus on writing, so I'd rather save some time than money.
    • nix23 6y ago
      Yes i understand you, fair point for sure. But what i don't understand is the Price-tag of Ghost.
• swiley 6y ago
  If you use SaaS you’ve got to back your stuff up locally. If the app you’re using can’t handle this then don’t use it.
• prawn 6y ago
  I read the comments before the article and going by the defenders of the CEO, I expected the user to be well and truly in the wrong. But wow, nowhere near. They were a paying customer and far from a free-loader. The dispute was over staff accounts which are surely a non-factor in server load and other costs to Ghost. The user wrote an aggressive email that would take five seconds for support to kill-with-kindness in response, the same content in a tweet, and lost their work. I can only assume there is more to the story or the CEO was having a particularly frustrating/upsetting day because otherwise this is a pretty dodgy response.
  • marcinzm 6y ago
    >I can only assume there is more to the story or the CEO was having a particularly frustrating/upsetting day because otherwise this is a pretty dodgy response. Another post in this discussion notes that this isn't the first time the CEO has acted this way over petty things.
• krmmalik 6y ago
  Never liked John O Nolan. Way before BLM he tweeted something showcasing his white privilege and when I called him out on it he incredibly dismissive. He seems to be running his organisation in a similar manner. The man is very defensive and has many blind spots. This is why Ghost.org for me isn't never even a consideration when it comes to choosing a blogging platform.
• arnvald 6y ago
  As a paid Ghost.org user this makes me feel a bit uneasy. I realize that's just a one case and maybe the only one ever; also I wouldn't use such a harsh tone as OP in the email and on Twitter (maybe it's not the best way to handle pricing of staff users, but I wouldn't call it "extremely shady"). Still, the fact that CEO could just jump in and delete my site makes me concerned. Do I need to regularly back up all my content in case it gets suddenly deleted?
  • ColinWright 6y ago
    You should always have a copy of your own data. Always Without exception Your service provider may get hacked and lose all their data, or may have a disk failure and lose all their data, or abruptly go into administration and have your data inaccessible. Why would you not have a copy of your data? 8TB disks are cheap, buy 3 and rotate them. "rsync" is quick and efficient. You should always have a copy of your own data.
    • arnvald 6y ago
      Yeah, you're totally right! I think what I tried to say is that normally I have certain trust that the company managing my data has their own backup, so my own backup is kind of a last resort. While if they delete my data on purpose, then my backup is the only option left.
• plplok 6y ago
  24/7 Priority Support is a feature in the $199 monthly Business tier Thus I think the OP has been undercharged.
• oliv__ 6y ago
  Such a non-story. The CEO fired one of his customers who was being annoying. Great, all the power to him. And great that it's being published so all of the other users who feel like ranting about Ghost on twitter before getting a reply from support know what to expect. Refreshing in this politically correct world
• Alir3z4 6y ago
  At GoNevis.com we don't suspend or delete anyone accounts over charges. We simply send several reminders and if needed a personal email. In any case the blog will be still online. Never ever deleted or suspended. If no action by user over 30 days, we downgrade to free and still don't touch any of their configuration that they have applied over the paid account.
• onli 6y ago
  Use Digitalocean or one of the other hosters and host your own blog. You pay a fraction, you will be able to handle a lot of visitors (most likely more than you will ever see), and you will not lose access as easily. Especially if you use your own domain.
• gt2 6y ago
  Maybe you can get it back- possibly they just deactivated you and have it on a backup. You can migrate elsewhere.
• agustif 6y ago
  If you would like alternatives, a friend of mine is building a great decentralized blogging platform. https://github.com/pradel/sigle https://github.com/pradel/sigle https://app.sigle.io/login https://app.sigle.io/login
• o909 6y ago
  Ghost is ridiculously irrelevant these days. Just use next.js or docusaurus and host it for free on cloudflare workers or vercel.
  • monkin 6y ago
    Because everyone is a developer these days, even your grandparents.
    • o909 6y ago
      Everyone here is a developer. This is technical community and this post is here because OP is a dev. Ghost is 5 years behind anything that is relevant now not to mention it is extremely expensive for what it does. It's simply a free money printer for its owner.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
• dessant 6y ago
  Ghost uses one of my GitHub apps [1][2] that I wrote in my free time after their CTO asked me to do it [3], and I wonder how would their CEO feel if I would ban them because I condemn wiping customer data in retaliation for being criticized in public. Even if they decide to fire a customer, they should have notified them and let them export their data. Harming your customer's business because they criticized you is likely illegal, no matter how twisted your terms of service are, and I hope they will get sued for what they've done. [1] https://github.com/dessant/label-actions https://github.com/dessant/label-actions [2] https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/blob/master/.github/label-actions.yml https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/blob/master/.github/label-... [3] https://github.com/dessant/support-requests/issues/6 https://github.com/dessant/support-requests/issues/6
  • postapathy 6y ago
    OP here - Thankfully, later on, they did send me a win.rar file of data. Not sure how to use it since I'm not a techie. Asking some friends to help me unpack and restart.
    • dessant 6y ago
      Please report them to your local consumer protection agency, and if you have the resources, sue them for damages. This is the only way corporate abuse can be kept in check.
      • bufferoverflow 6y ago
        Sue them for what exactly? OP went over the limits of his plan, publicly shamed the company for doing nothing wrong, got refunded and got his data back. Ghost did fine, in my opinion.
        • dessant 6y ago
          They've terminated the customer's account before the 7 day upgrade window has lapsed, which has caused disruption to their business.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• mhaberl 6y ago
  pg mentions this on twitter: [1] >If you want your startup to succeed, treat your users the opposite of the way this one does: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1294601723437289472 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1294601723437289472
  • throwawaysea 6y ago
    Broken link?
    • mhaberl 6y ago
      I guess he deleted the tweet, can't find it anymore
• wruza 6y ago
  As of now, what we have here is a finished process of firing a customer, who got their money back and got their data back. Nothing was deleted or withheld. The quick toxic behavior got what it deserved (except for insults, which I find unnecessary). Learn your lessons, both sides. Be polite and give time to respond, don't act quickly, and always part ways with people who think mindless emotion or self-centered thinking is a good part of business.
  • luckylion 6y ago
    > and got their data back after going viral, apparently. Once again proving that you need social media to make these kinds of businesses behave ethically.
    • wruza 6y ago
      They went "viral" immediately before the conflict, so that doesn't prove anything. The fact that ghost sent them data shows that nothing was "deleted", only suspended. This whole situation rests on the fact that one emotional abuser of plan limits went to their mob immediately and then bombarded ghost with no time to respond. Personally, I do not even believe that someone "works so hard" that they can forget what limits they chose, when they made a clear decision on which plan to use. It seems to be as shitty customer behavior as ghost ceo's answers at the very least. I also believe that if they sent an email asking for data after being suspended, or, after being charged for a new plan, sent an email asking for a refund or a discount because they "didn't" know, they'd get it. Everyone loves a good service, but nobody likes abusive personalities who scream, shout and accuse without a good reason, for things that didn't even happen yet. That's a definition of an asshole. What I can't believe is that almost everyone here jumps to one-sided conclusions after an alarmist blog post that is few hours old. Good lesson on how to deal with them though (although I already knew what to do in a similar situation).
• tukinaf 6y ago
  Use https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev instead
• hosker4u 6y ago
  When two petulant people meet.
• blfr 6y ago
  If you like Ghost but not Ghost.org, you can host it yourself. It's only slightly more difficult than Wordpress. https://ghost.org/docs/install/ubuntu/ https://ghost.org/docs/install/ubuntu/
• millzlane 6y ago
  I'm not a "startup" guy. I've worked at many places and I've helped a lot of SMB's turn around their company with only a decently designed website and some better customer service. One thing I have always said is that you can have a million good reviews. But it will be only one that will be the downfall of your company. This reminds me of that. This was an opportunity to fix what the user was complaining about. Instead the CEO's behavior clearly shows what kind of support to expect when you're unhappy with the service. I've complained publicly about gmail before, never would I think I would have my account removed and data deleted by the CEO. "LIKE US OR I WILL BAN YOU!"
• T3RMINATED 6y ago
  use wordpress over ghost everytime
• g_p 6y ago
  This seems like an opportunity Ghost should have taken to listen and learn - it sounds like the "on ramp" for their up-sell is just too slippery, and people end up on the "on ramp" without realising. There is then a significant (3x) uptick in monthly fee. This strikes me as a missed opportunity to offer the discounted (paid annually) rate to the customer if they're wanting to upgrade, and a missed opportunity to improve the product experience so users don't add new users and unwittingly exceed their plan's allowance. Given the addition of a staff user involves user interaction, this could actually be used as an opportunity to get the user to select their plan to upgrade to, to enable this. Presumably ghost hoped to use inertia to slide users into more expensive plans, and this understandably upsets users. The response from Ghost however is disappointing and sadly emphasises my concerns around the growing reliance on "SaaS" business models. Given Ghost is open source, hopefully someone will see the opportunity for a more straightforward and transparent way of pricing and doing business, as the response here suggests there may be a small market for it.
  • HenryBemis 6y ago
    As per the "$100 startup", one should drop the 20% of clients that take up 80% of your time, and focus the ones that are cost effective (noise-free profit). They may have (or not) learned their lesson and gave a full refund and closed the door. As a precaution/suggestion, when I work on an app (a website is a different thing but the analogy remains), I take a backup not (just) at the EOD, but "every now and then". It could be something simple such as zipping the folder with the xcode project (and files-images-etc), screenshots every now and then, so my time is not completely wasted. Ghost does have shitty controls (and probably practices as the article implies), it cannot be that they "forgot" to limit the value of number X to >=2 by accident. It's the typical scummy practice so you slip, they catch you red-handed and then charge you it since you already got used to using 4+ accounts. On the other hand, the author is also a bit shady. He knows that the limit is 2, creates 4, gets the warning, DOES NOT get charged, and then nags about it. Tried to cheat and got caught by someone (equally) unethical?
• Grimm1 6y ago
  So the actions the CEO took are inexcusable but OP's communications were very accusatory and then tweeting about it before any resolution could be handled via email was a dick move but the CEO should never have responded the way he did. "makes you look like an asshole." is not at all a tactful way of handling criticism thrown at your company. You're both wrong in my book the CEO was just more wrong and the actions of deleting your account like that is a big no no.
• taosx 6y ago
  I can't say I agree with the actions of both the Author and the CEO. It wasn't the nicest thing to go on twitter bad-mouthing when you're using the service and still planning to do so, 7 days notice was enough (google,amazon cloud offering bite you instantly). It wasn't right to delete your account but from a business perspective I would also prefer to end it (not this way) with a bad customer early so I can focus on other things. I both provide and I'm a customer of different online services...so I get both perspectives but some customers are impossible (they want everything for free and are still not satisfied)
  • tarr11 6y ago
    It appears they were paying $36/ month and were getting upgraded to $99/ month
• at_a_remove 6y ago
  Remember when the Cloudflare CEO "woke up in a bad mood" one morning and dumped a customer? And we said it was a one-off, but it turned out not to be. I'm guessing that stuff like this happens a lot, and Twitter serves as both a cause of provocation and notification of mechanism. We just may not have been witness to this before.
• dependenttypes 6y ago
  The old text has been deleted now. https://archive.is/MdOfw https://archive.is/MdOfw and https://web.archive.org/web/20200815110730/https://postapathy.substack.com/p/i-was-building-a-new-website-for https://web.archive.org/web/20200815110730/https://postapath... provide the old version.
  • avery42 6y ago
    Really weird that the author decided to delete the entire article, instead of just placing the update above the old contents.
• llacb47 6y ago
  Archive: https://archive.fo/MdOfw https://archive.fo/MdOfw https://web.archive.org/web/20200815110730/https://postapathy.substack.com/p/i-was-building-a-new-website-for https://web.archive.org/web/20200815110730/https://postapath...
  • Wronnay 6y ago
    The web never forgets :-)
• rotterdamdev 6y ago
  They were right to ban him and refund. Nobody needs customers who who wolf on Twitter and call your business shady. You don't need every user. Feel free to remove the problematic ones, and save yourself the trouble.
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  This is very disappointing. Are there any alternative platforms that are simply hands off (censorship free) with content as an explicit policy and commitment to their customers?
• msh 6y ago
  Seems that the website removed the original article.
• nurettin 6y ago
  Moral of the story is, if you want to use Ghost as a hosted blogging service, be extremely polite, or else John will piss on you on twitter, then come to your house, trash the place and kick the dog.
• simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  > UPDATE: I have received all my data and a full refund, and I am now self-hosting my website. I no longer have any beef with John O'Nolan and Ghost. I wish them all the best. Still a pity that the original blog post is no longer there.