8 ms·

Moving On...

118 points by laCour 15y ago

Eyalush 15y ago
I can appreciate the effort and the sentiment of this post, but it definitely reveals a "shoot from the hip" mentality at the company.
- geuis 15y ago
  It more likely reveals a single person who works for this company that personally performed these actions. People all to often attribute the actions of individuals inside a company as the actions of the company. The two are not the same.
  - jdelsman 15y ago
    It more likely reveals that "Doug" and "Jules" are the same 14-year-old in his mom's basement.
  - samdalton 15y ago
    I've been with thiswebhost for a number of years now, and Jules has always been the one to answer support tickets, fix server issues, write blog posts, talk to people on twitter and facebook, etc. Running a shared hosting business in the way that they do can't be very easy, so I suppose it's not always feasible to hire full time customer service staff. The latest post addresses that, and explains mostly everything that went wrong with this ordeal.
  - VladRussian 15y ago
    >People all to often attribute the actions of individuals inside a company as the actions of the company. The two are not the same. ok. So how or who performs "the actions of a company" if not the "individuals inside the company"? Especially if these individuals are explicitly given access to official twitter account, etc... of the company.
  - xtracto 15y ago
    The problem here for me is that said individual is still working within the company. Thus, even if I never hear of him, nobody can guarantee that I won't be bitten by his unprofessional behaviour later if I keep doing business with the company. And after all, said individual did performed actions while wearing his administrator hat. This deffinitely makes him part of the company. Why do you think Google, Microsoft and all other big companies do not allow Engineers and programmers to make public statements (about the company), unless they specify with uppercase bolds that this is their own opinion.
mtogo 15y ago
So... one guy did all this, it was inappropriate, but you're keeping him on board? I think the purpose of this blog post was to try to reclaim this*'s reputation after the incident, but for me it just solidified that i should never, ever use thiswebhost.
- rkalla 15y ago
  From a customer/outside perspective, I absolutely see how you are coming to this conclusion, but if I suddenly handed you the checkbook to that company, keys to the office and said "Keep this place running, keep making money and keep paying these 10 salaries" your conclusion would probably be different. I am impressed that the company had the foresight to realize that the people they currently have on suck at CS and need to be replaced with someone better at it. That is a very self-aware decision. Also you can't cut your nose off despite your face. Jules is clearly a talented tech lead and you can't boot the only guy out the door that understands the inner workings of such a technical company/service. I am impressed with how this small company is dealing with this; they are doing the best they possibly can. The proof will be in the long-term-pudding for sure, but I think these are all sensible moves.
- VladRussian 15y ago
  >but you're keeping him on board? what are the alternatives ? that guy seems to be a company owner and the registrant of the domain, ie. basically the guy _is_ the company :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890546 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890546
  - eric-hu 15y ago
    Interesting. You make me wonder if Doug (the new blog post writer) actually works for the company or if he's even a real person.
    - benatkin 15y ago
      I'm not sure where the O would come from, but if Doug and Jules turn out to be the same person, I'm calling him O'Doul's.
tiles 15y ago
I'm still impressed that neither blog post by This addressed why Boris' account was seemingly baselessly suspended (which ultimately led to the Go Fuck Yourself comment), since all he did was inquire about the PayPal dispute. The revising of their Tos Is a great step forward, but that point alone remains really troubling.
- rkalla 15y ago
  I think this was hand-waved away with the admission that Jules is terrible at customer support... the implication being that he was on a rage-bender and nuked the account.
  - trickjarrett 15y ago
    Terrible is not the right word, 'unthinkingly destructive' perhaps.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
WettowelReactor 15y ago
"I would like to remind people that contacting us with abusive e-mail messages is in fact illegal and we will be taking the appropriate steps to forward these messages and information gathered to both the relevant ISP’s and law enforcement agencies." So criticism is still not tolerated it sounds to me that these guys still dont get it.
- rvanniekerk 15y ago
  Criticism is one thing, death-threats and hate mail are something entirely different.
desigooner 15y ago
This blog post was preceded by a different post by Jules. That post was deleted and this post by Doug took it's place instead. Here's the google cache link of the deleted post: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.thiswebhost.com%2Fblog%2F2011%2F08%2F16%2Fthe-reddit-incident%2F https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=ca... Content of the deleted post: The Reddit Incident POSTED BY Jules ON August 16, 2011 AT 4:45 pm UNDER Uncategorized I’m sure you may have heard about it by now, and if not I’m sure you soon will! I wanted to take this opportunity to make a blog post about the situation and post some information from our side of the fence. Before I begin though, I’d like to thank the tens of people who felt the need to e-mail us death threats and general profanity. We have forwarded these on to your ISP’s abuse departments. Yesterday on Twitter we were asked by a user why their friends account was suspended because of a PayPal dispute. Our terms and conditions are very clear that in the case of any PayPal disputes, or other payment disputes, all services are suspended until the dispute is closed and the payment issue(s) resolved. These are typical terms that most web hosting providers have, and in some cases a provider will even charge a fee to restore any accounts that have been suspended because of a payment dispute. We don’t, for the record. So, when asked why their friends account was suspended we told them “Our terms are very clear. Your friend should not have opened a fraudulent dispute.” We then sent a DM to the individual who asked, saying the following: “Please mind your own business. Your friends account, and PayPal dispute has nothing to do with you.” Of course, as a hosting provider we cannot discuss the details of another account and its status with others. Because of this message, we were informed that they would be canceling their accounts due to our “unprofessional-ism”. After much continued pushing from these users, we then responded (rather sarcastically I might add) with the following: “Fantastic. Perhaps you can sign up with a hosting provider who doesn’t take privacy seriously then. Enjoy.” We take privacy very seriously. If your friend has an issue with their account, your friend needs to contact us. Despite being your friend, it does not mean we will discuss their account(s) with you and it does not entitle you to demand information about a specific issue or incident. Your friends account is theirs, and theirs alone. So, cue more pushing and baiting on Twitter and we then come to the conclusion that this situation is obviously some attempt for these users to attack us for reasons unknown, and we decide to end our business relationship with them. What this effectively means is that we decide to suspend their account(s) and offer them a full backup of their data with us. Of the two users we did this for, one of them was extremely polite and requested a backup of their data, which we provided to them. This user also had domains in their account which they still have full access to, and we even informed them via e-mail that they should transfer them to another provider as soon as possible as we would no longer be providing support to them. The other posted on Twitter that they were looking for another hosting provider, to which we responded “Best of luck with your new host!”. This was not intended to be a taunt, this was intended to be the closing line to our discussion with them. Our way of saying “OK, best of luck, we consider this matter closed now”. Unfortunately, this user interpreted it to be a taunt or goad. They then responded with direct profanity aimed at us. At this point before the profanity I’d like to state that their account was only suspended. They had full access to a backup of their data and files. After the profanity (which was completely unnecessary) we terminated the account immediately, no longer wishing to do any form of business or communication with the client. As part of our termination system, any backups we store for an account are automatically removed via an action hook we have deployed. We don’t see any logic in storing data for terminated accounts that we no longer host, so they are removed instantly. Please note; this wasn’t a manual “Oh I’m going to remove your backups because you swore at me!” situation. This was an automated process that occurs immediately after any account on our servers is terminated. So let’s just recap a little; we have 1 account that is suspended with full access to a backup of their data and their domain names. We have another account that is fully terminated, with all data removed, due to severe breach of our terms. And then we have the Twitter/Reddit aftermath…. Now, I fully understand how as a customer or potential customer, a hosting provider terminating your account and deleting your data without notice is a bad thing. Hell, if it happened to me I’d be very angry indeed. But what you have to remember is that this isn’t a typical situation, and certainly isn’t a random event. This is the direct result of publically swearing at and abusing your hosting provider, something which is actually covered in our Acceptable Usage Policy and results in instant account termination. Please also remember that before the termination, the customer was able to obtain all of their data in the way of a backup should they have requested it. The moment they decided to cross that line and become abusive in that manner, they made a conscious choice to break our terms and the result is the enforcement of that. The other friend who didn’t decide to abuse us? They still have full access to their data and domains, and are presumably looking for a new host. I’m not saying we’re right and the users were wrong. I’m not saying that perhaps some other hosting providers would’ve dealt with the suspension(s) and termination differently, to each their own. What you need to discern is that this is an extremely rare situation. Our terms and conditions were broken, something that very rarely happens, but when it does the outcome is always the same. These are our policies and these are how we respond. Many of you won’t know because quite frankly, you’ll never break our terms – which is precisely the issue here. Ridicule us for it if you will.
elliottcarlson 15y ago
"I would like to remind people that contacting us with abusive e-mail messages is in fact illegal and we will be taking the appropriate steps to forward these messages and information gathered to both the relevant ISP’s and law enforcement agencies. " From what I understand, from doing some research, this is not necessarily the case. Threatening someone would be illegal, harassment as well - but profanity for the most part is not illegal in most places (though there are certain states and countries that do have profanity laws). Additionally, "abusive" is a term that can be quite broad, and in certain cases it could definitely be a judgement call on how one person might see it compared to someone else. I'm not saying people should go cursing out any one they have a complaint with, but at the same time if you are dealing with customer support, you need to have thick skin and patience - and if necessary then cancel the business relationship with the customer, but don't go pulling the legal card on an unhappy customer in every case.
systems 15y ago
the web hosting business is a ghetto, just check the horror stories on webhostingtalk and you will learn never to trust a hosting company and only buy hosting from extremely reputable companies
Athtar 15y ago
Perhaps I am reading too much into it but why did they not mention that they took down the previous blog post (http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/the-reddit-incident/ http://www.thiswebhost.com/blog/2011/08/16/the-reddit-incide...)? They mention that they took down the tweets but why no mention of the blog posts?
gfunk911 15y ago
1. Are there seriously smiley faces in this serious post defending your company? 2. From what I can understand, they suspended multiple accounts, one of which was paid in full. The paid in full account's owner cursed out the company on twitter. I assume everyone will agree with this statement, but I'll state it anyway: You can't cancel valid accounts! If the account is paid in full, and assuming the account isn't being used for nefarious purposes, you cannot cancel valid accounts for any reason. If I have a Rackspace account, I can go into twitter and say "Rackspace fucking sucks, everyone who works there can go fuck themselves," and there's no chance in hell my account would be canceled. The idea that they are still defending this action is unbelievable. If I hypothetically had an account with This* (which I would never ever have), and there's an outage of some kind and I call to complain, I'm going to be afraid that if I lose my cool for a second, my account's gonna be canceled. I'm not exaggerating, I would legitimately have that fear. And one is supposed to do business with this people? Are they out of their minds?
- strathmeyer 15y ago
  They had me at the exclamation point, and kept me rolling all the way to "this is why comments have been disabled".
- philwelch 15y ago
  > I assume everyone will agree with this statement, but I'll state it anyway: You can't cancel valid accounts! If the account is paid in full, and assuming the account isn't being used for nefarious purposes, you cannot cancel valid accounts for any reason. I'll agree with that, but with qualifications. Certainly you don't just cut off somebody's service. But there are pathological clients who aren't worth keeping on. I don't want to go into details, but I've personally seen one particular case, at a hosting company I once worked for, where it was no longer worth the time and aggravation to keep a certain customer, despite their (as far as I knew) flawless payment record.. We gave them a month to find another service provider, but there was no way we would allow them to remain a customer after that. As a business, you have the right to deny service to anyone for any reason, aside from certain protected classes such as race and sex. Unless you're broke, you can and should exercise this right to whatever extent it benefits your business. And even if you're broke, sometimes you should consider it.
latch 15y ago
I think the post is slightly unprofessional, but I nonetheless think it does a good job of trying to move beyond the issue. I think people calling for Jules' head are flat our wrong. To the best of my knowledge, he isn't a repeat offender, and now this* has made it unlikely that he will be, without having to fire him (and coincidentally, allowing him to do what this* considers him good at). I'm generally not crazy about "off-with-his-head" mentality.
- Terretta 15y ago
  > isn't a repeat offender I'd had a glance at the last couple weeks worth of tweets and they seemed generally more "the customer's never right, good riddance" than most official twitter accounts. Smelled like burned out admin to me.
philk 15y ago
I would like to remind people that contacting us with abusive e-mail messages is in fact illegal and we will be taking the appropriate steps to forward these messages and information gathered to both the relevant ISP’s and law enforcement agencies. Sadly it is the people who post such messages that are causing me to disable comments on this blog post. Having to disable comments on your conciliatory blog post is a sign that you should go back and make it more conciliatory.
- patio11 15y ago
  I can't agree here. Nobody owes the world comments, and most particularly they do not owe the Reddit hivemind the opportunity for a good one-minute hate.
  - philk 15y ago
    I agree that nobody owes the world comments but the point of a conciliatory blog post is to make people stop hating you. If they're still hating you to the point where you've had to turn off comments then your post isn't doing its job properly. (I also agree with your earlier post that if you're selling web hosting for $3/month you'll have to deal with quite a few difficult customers. Often the people who pay the least are the hardest to deal with.)
    - tedunangst 15y ago
      What happens if the haters aren't interested in conciliation?
    - Aissen 15y ago
      Except if there's hate inertia: http://abstrusegoose.com/388 http://abstrusegoose.com/388
tptacek 15y ago
Again: enough. These people do not matter. We can stop wasting time talking about them. The travails of people who run into payment problems over $5 web hosting accounts do not constitute "Hacker News". This is a fake controversy. We do not need to evaluate what either side says; neither side matters. Flagged.
- danielsiders 15y ago
  It's a phenomenal case study in how not to do customer service and social media at a small tech company. I think there are a lot of people in the HN community who could learn a thing or two from this discussion.
  - khafra 15y ago
    I'd like to think that the number of HNers who could learn is vanishingly small. I believe the appeal is more along the lines of "Jersey Shore for Internet entrepreneurs."
- muppetman 15y ago
  So because you have the opinion it's faked, you're going to tell the rest of us how we should react and what we find interesting? Thanks, but I'll make my own choice.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    I don't think it's faked. I think it's a waste of our time. I think this is an unprofessional tin-can web host grappling with an unprofessional penny-ante web site making an amount of noise completely out of proportion to their relevance. Like I said earlier, the only thing any of us have to learn from these people is: "don't be these people".
- joshu 15y ago
  I agree. Some idiots were idiots on the Internet. Why is this interesting to hackers?
akent 15y ago
Seems to me like Doug is just digging them deeper.
Vivtek 15y ago
So they're standing by their decision to kill an account because their feelings got hurt, which is already enough to make me doubt their professionalism. But the part that makes me choke is the phrase "the language used by yourself". While it's true that the subjunctive mood can help defuse an emotional situation by deemphasizing the agency of the action, you're doing it wrong. For God's sake, learn English.
- tedunangst 15y ago
  That's not the subjunctive. You're doing it wrong. For God's sake, learn English.
  - Vivtek 15y ago
    Ha! That's sleep deprivation in action. In my defense, although I manage to misname the passive mode, its usage is known to myself.
strathmeyer 15y ago
One of the tweets they've removed pointed you to their webutation page (http://www.webutation.net/go/review/thiswebhost.com http://www.webutation.net/go/review/thiswebhost.com) and bragged that they had 100/100. I remember reading it and wanting to reply, "not anymore..."
- mikezupan 15y ago
  funny thing is any site that isn't putting out spam has a 100/100. no reviews needed
- corin_ 15y ago
  Seems to be 40/100 now, guess they would have done better not to link it to people who are going to review them badly...
daniel_iversen 15y ago
Get over the issue will you! What's done is done, "sh#t happens".. I think the company has taken appropriate steps and I for one would like them NOT to fire (but give him a strike on top of what they already have done) the poor nerd why got so frustrated that he used a totally inappropriate tone with clients.
- mtogo 15y ago
  > the poor nerd why got so frustrated that he used a totally inappropriate tone with clients. And then canceled the accounts of paying clients, who had done nothing wrong, and deleted all of their information.
rvanniekerk 15y ago
As the Co-founder of a statup that has dealt directly with situations like this in the past, I don't see much wrong with how the situation was handled. You wouldn't expect a restaurant owner to put up with a rude and insulting customer being a dick to restaurant staff, so why should any other service have to put up with it? Some customers just aren't worth the hassle they put out PERIOD. I don't give a shit if you're willing to pay me $9.99 a month, if you purposely go out of your way to insult myself or a member of my team, you don't gain the benefit of using our product, end of story. * Edit * - Just to clarify, I don't see the need for them deleting the previous blog post, if you're going to respond to something in public, you should probably stand behind what you are saying before pushing publish.
- starwed 15y ago
  This seems to be one of those stories which has mutated. In the original account, the poster says they inquired about a problem, had their account terminated, and then flipped out. Almost every commenter on HN seems to assume that the account termination happened after the flip-out, but from what I can tell that isn't correct?
  - wvenable 15y ago
    The fully paid and not in dispute account was suspended (disabled) because of the account owner's twitter comments. The account owner then swore on twitter and so his account was further deleted and all backups destroyed. The story hasn't mutated but the details are subtle.
    - starwed 15y ago
      The chain of events, as originally laid out[1], was: * OP has paypal payment issue with This. * Friend asks them via twitter "That's not cool. Suspending a friends account because of a minor PayPal dispute? When did you get into doing that?" * They respond saying "Please mind your own business."[2] * OP and This* get into a dispute about whether such a response was professional or not. * Both accounts are then suspended. (This part is unclear from the original account. OP says that is at this point his account was suspended, while friend's twitter implies it had been suspended earlier. My guess would be it was originally supposed to be a temporary suspension until payment was worked out?) * OP flips out a bit and swears on twitter. * Backups deleted. ------------------------------- Friend's twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/boriskourt http://twitter.com/#!/boriskourt OP's twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/berfarah http://twitter.com/#!/berfarah [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/jk195/stay_the_fuck_away_from_this_thiswebhostcom/ http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/jk195/stay_the_f... [2] http://i.imgur.com/Hc0Bh.png http://i.imgur.com/Hc0Bh.png
dulse 15y ago
It's amazing to me how incompetent otherwise sophisticated companies are at handling public relations. It's not rocket science, and it's not about who's right. This post comes off as smug, half-hearted, and insulting. Why are they joking and making light of the technical director's unprofessional conduct? Why are they trying to parse how the customer's twitter comeback wasn't justified? Why are they separating the latter part of the post as the "more serious note," thus implying the first half isn't serious? This is serious for the company, whether they know it or not. After reading this post, I come away thinking the company doesn't take this situation seriously, they don't take their customers seriously, and they wouldn't handle my problems seriously if I were a customer. They should have 1) Made a direct, unmitigated apology; 2) Clarified what their company stands for regarding terminating accounts with specific policy improvements, not a promise to review the policy; 3) Left the excuses for Jules out of it; 4) Left out the legal threats to people e-mailing the company (the blog post isn't about the company's problems, it's about the customers' problems); 5) Titled it "An Apology" or "A New Direction" or basically anything besides "Moving On..." which sounds like a command being issued in conjunction with an exaggerated eye roll. Why don't these firms just hire a pr/crisis consultant to help? If they suspect the crisis could cost the company more than a few thousand dollars if not handled correctly, it's a no-brainer. The best-case scenario is that they lose a few thousand dollars improving their public image; the alternative could be losing a chunk of their user base.
larrys 15y ago
...see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soup_Nazi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soup_Nazi
jdoss 15y ago
What we have here folks is just another beautiful day in web hosting. The industry is rough at times and both sides, clients/companies sometimes need to step back, relax and hug it out. I would say most issues that erupt into something even a fraction of what this turned into is due to miscommunication between hosting provider and client. That or downtime. Server downtime causes even the sane person to lose it under the right conditions.
hoop 15y ago
Customers are sometimes abusive, particularly on support lines. Anyone who works in a service industry needs to learn to deal with that. Even if they don't interact with customers, they should learn the people skills anyhow because really we all have "customers" - even if they are internal to the company. On the other hand, at $3/mo, I'd say "this" could've gone ahead and terminated the hosting of the "painful" customers (keeping backups,) but only doing so at later date and with notice when everyone wasn't so fired up. IMO their "technical director" also needs to be let go. Maybe not today, but after they've had a chance to get a new person trained but more importantly get their domains and accounts transferred into the company's (or its owner's) name. The TD has demonstrated that he's over-reactive. If kept with the company, there's the risk that he further damages the company in the future (even with him being isolated away from customers). If he's let go, there's the risk of overreacting and damaging the company in other ways.
martinkallstrom 15y ago
The significant line in this blog post is right at the bottom: "Comments are closed."
jgeerts 15y ago
For me thiswebhost.com has lost all credibility. A website is a source of income and just cannot be joked with. As gfunk stated, the fact that it became personal for a company is ridiculous. You always will have unsatisfied customers and yes sometimes they will curse at your company, but there can be NO reason to terminate a source of income.
lsc 15y ago
From experience, if you screw up and the other guy responds badly, saying "I screwed up, but the other guy responded poorly" is not going to be received as well as just saying "I screwed up." Only very rarely have I seen more benefit actively defending myself from a customer's accusation rather than apologizing and taking responsibility, even if it was only partly my fault.
- pestaa 15y ago
  Well, yes, but they felt they need to restore some reputation. (Or would my post be received better if I just said "Well, yes"? :))
  - lsc 15y ago
    I'm saying that your reputation usually fairs better if you say "I'm sorry for being an asshole" vs. "I'm sorry for being an asshole, but that other guy was also being an asshole" I mean, the second is usually the case; but as a business, you are expected to be 'the bigger person' and, you know, not delete people's personal data because they are being dicks to you. Defending your actions, in some minds, makes it sound more likely that you'd do it again in the same situation.
    - pestaa 15y ago
      I did both agree with your statements wholeheartedly and reflect on them in the same manner. There was no need to explain it again, but thanks. :)
      - lsc 15y ago
        sorry. I need to watch this tendency to re-state my previous argument when I think someone disagrees with me. I am told I do the same thing in person, and it's just not very productive.

118 points by laCour 15y ago

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

geuis 15y ago
It more likely reveals a single person who works for this company that personally performed these actions. People all to often attribute the actions of individuals inside a company as the actions of the company. The two are not the same.
- jdelsman 15y ago
  It more likely reveals that "Doug" and "Jules" are the same 14-year-old in his mom's basement.
- samdalton 15y ago
  I've been with thiswebhost for a number of years now, and Jules has always been the one to answer support tickets, fix server issues, write blog posts, talk to people on twitter and facebook, etc. Running a shared hosting business in the way that they do can't be very easy, so I suppose it's not always feasible to hire full time customer service staff. The latest post addresses that, and explains mostly everything that went wrong with this ordeal.
- VladRussian 15y ago
  >People all to often attribute the actions of individuals inside a company as the actions of the company. The two are not the same. ok. So how or who performs "the actions of a company" if not the "individuals inside the company"? Especially if these individuals are explicitly given access to official twitter account, etc... of the company.
- xtracto 15y ago
  The problem here for me is that said individual is still working within the company. Thus, even if I never hear of him, nobody can guarantee that I won't be bitten by his unprofessional behaviour later if I keep doing business with the company. And after all, said individual did performed actions while wearing his administrator hat. This deffinitely makes him part of the company. Why do you think Google, Microsoft and all other big companies do not allow Engineers and programmers to make public statements (about the company), unless they specify with uppercase bolds that this is their own opinion.

mtogo 15y ago

So... one guy did all this, it was inappropriate, but you're keeping him on board? I think the purpose of this blog post was to try to reclaim this*'s reputation after the incident, but for me it just solidified that i should never, ever use thiswebhost.

rkalla 15y ago
From a customer/outside perspective, I absolutely see how you are coming to this conclusion, but if I suddenly handed you the checkbook to that company, keys to the office and said "Keep this place running, keep making money and keep paying these 10 salaries" your conclusion would probably be different. I am impressed that the company had the foresight to realize that the people they currently have on suck at CS and need to be replaced with someone better at it. That is a very self-aware decision. Also you can't cut your nose off despite your face. Jules is clearly a talented tech lead and you can't boot the only guy out the door that understands the inner workings of such a technical company/service. I am impressed with how this small company is dealing with this; they are doing the best they possibly can. The proof will be in the long-term-pudding for sure, but I think these are all sensible moves.
VladRussian 15y ago
>but you're keeping him on board? what are the alternatives ? that guy seems to be a company owner and the registrant of the domain, ie. basically the guy _is_ the company :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890546 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890546
- eric-hu 15y ago
  Interesting. You make me wonder if Doug (the new blog post writer) actually works for the company or if he's even a real person.
  - benatkin 15y ago
    I'm not sure where the O would come from, but if Doug and Jules turn out to be the same person, I'm calling him O'Doul's.

tiles 15y ago

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

rkalla 15y ago
I think this was hand-waved away with the admission that Jules is terrible at customer support... the implication being that he was on a rage-bender and nuked the account.
- trickjarrett 15y ago
  Terrible is not the right word, 'unthinkingly destructive' perhaps.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]

WettowelReactor 15y ago

rvanniekerk 15y ago
Criticism is one thing, death-threats and hate mail are something entirely different.

desigooner 15y ago

This blog post was preceded by a different post by Jules. That post was deleted and this post by Doug took it's place instead. Here's the google cache link of the deleted post: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.thiswebhost.com%2Fblog%2F2011%2F08%2F16%2Fthe-reddit-incident%2F https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=ca... Content of the deleted post: The Reddit Incident POSTED BY Jules ON August 16, 2011 AT 4:45 pm UNDER Uncategorized I’m sure you may have heard about it by now, and if not I’m sure you soon will! I wanted to take this opportunity to make a blog post about the situation and post some information from our side of the fence. Before I begin though, I’d like to thank the tens of people who felt the need to e-mail us death threats and general profanity. We have forwarded these on to your ISP’s abuse departments. Yesterday on Twitter we were asked by a user why their friends account was suspended because of a PayPal dispute. Our terms and conditions are very clear that in the case of any PayPal disputes, or other payment disputes, all services are suspended until the dispute is closed and the payment issue(s) resolved. These are typical terms that most web hosting providers have, and in some cases a provider will even charge a fee to restore any accounts that have been suspended because of a payment dispute. We don’t, for the record. So, when asked why their friends account was suspended we told them “Our terms are very clear. Your friend should not have opened a fraudulent dispute.” We then sent a DM to the individual who asked, saying the following: “Please mind your own business. Your friends account, and PayPal dispute has nothing to do with you.” Of course, as a hosting provider we cannot discuss the details of another account and its status with others. Because of this message, we were informed that they would be canceling their accounts due to our “unprofessional-ism”. After much continued pushing from these users, we then responded (rather sarcastically I might add) with the following: “Fantastic. Perhaps you can sign up with a hosting provider who doesn’t take privacy seriously then. Enjoy.” We take privacy very seriously. If your friend has an issue with their account, your friend needs to contact us. Despite being your friend, it does not mean we will discuss their account(s) with you and it does not entitle you to demand information about a specific issue or incident. Your friends account is theirs, and theirs alone. So, cue more pushing and baiting on Twitter and we then come to the conclusion that this situation is obviously some attempt for these users to attack us for reasons unknown, and we decide to end our business relationship with them. What this effectively means is that we decide to suspend their account(s) and offer them a full backup of their data with us. Of the two users we did this for, one of them was extremely polite and requested a backup of their data, which we provided to them. This user also had domains in their account which they still have full access to, and we even informed them via e-mail that they should transfer them to another provider as soon as possible as we would no longer be providing support to them. The other posted on Twitter that they were looking for another hosting provider, to which we responded “Best of luck with your new host!”. This was not intended to be a taunt, this was intended to be the closing line to our discussion with them. Our way of saying “OK, best of luck, we consider this matter closed now”. Unfortunately, this user interpreted it to be a taunt or goad. They then responded with direct profanity aimed at us. At this point before the profanity I’d like to state that their account was only suspended. They had full access to a backup of their data and files. After the profanity (which was completely unnecessary) we terminated the account immediately, no longer wishing to do any form of business or communication with the client. As part of our termination system, any backups we store for an account are automatically removed via an action hook we have deployed. We don’t see any logic in storing data for terminated accounts that we no longer host, so they are removed instantly. Please note; this wasn’t a manual “Oh I’m going to remove your backups because you swore at me!” situation. This was an automated process that occurs immediately after any account on our servers is terminated. So let’s just recap a little; we have 1 account that is suspended with full access to a backup of their data and their domain names. We have another account that is fully terminated, with all data removed, due to severe breach of our terms. And then we have the Twitter/Reddit aftermath…. Now, I fully understand how as a customer or potential customer, a hosting provider terminating your account and deleting your data without notice is a bad thing. Hell, if it happened to me I’d be very angry indeed. But what you have to remember is that this isn’t a typical situation, and certainly isn’t a random event. This is the direct result of publically swearing at and abusing your hosting provider, something which is actually covered in our Acceptable Usage Policy and results in instant account termination. Please also remember that before the termination, the customer was able to obtain all of their data in the way of a backup should they have requested it. The moment they decided to cross that line and become abusive in that manner, they made a conscious choice to break our terms and the result is the enforcement of that. The other friend who didn’t decide to abuse us? They still have full access to their data and domains, and are presumably looking for a new host. I’m not saying we’re right and the users were wrong. I’m not saying that perhaps some other hosting providers would’ve dealt with the suspension(s) and termination differently, to each their own. What you need to discern is that this is an extremely rare situation. Our terms and conditions were broken, something that very rarely happens, but when it does the outcome is always the same. These are our policies and these are how we respond. Many of you won’t know because quite frankly, you’ll never break our terms – which is precisely the issue here. Ridicule us for it if you will.

elliottcarlson 15y ago

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

systems 15y ago

the web hosting business is a ghetto, just check the horror stories on webhostingtalk and you will learn never to trust a hosting company and only buy hosting from extremely reputable companies

Athtar 15y ago

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

gfunk911 15y ago

1. Are there seriously smiley faces in this serious post defending your company? 2. From what I can understand, they suspended multiple accounts, one of which was paid in full. The paid in full account's owner cursed out the company on twitter. I assume everyone will agree with this statement, but I'll state it anyway: You can't cancel valid accounts! If the account is paid in full, and assuming the account isn't being used for nefarious purposes, you cannot cancel valid accounts for any reason. If I have a Rackspace account, I can go into twitter and say "Rackspace fucking sucks, everyone who works there can go fuck themselves," and there's no chance in hell my account would be canceled. The idea that they are still defending this action is unbelievable. If I hypothetically had an account with This* (which I would never ever have), and there's an outage of some kind and I call to complain, I'm going to be afraid that if I lose my cool for a second, my account's gonna be canceled. I'm not exaggerating, I would legitimately have that fear. And one is supposed to do business with this people? Are they out of their minds?

strathmeyer 15y ago
They had me at the exclamation point, and kept me rolling all the way to "this is why comments have been disabled".
philwelch 15y ago
> I assume everyone will agree with this statement, but I'll state it anyway: You can't cancel valid accounts! If the account is paid in full, and assuming the account isn't being used for nefarious purposes, you cannot cancel valid accounts for any reason. I'll agree with that, but with qualifications. Certainly you don't just cut off somebody's service. But there are pathological clients who aren't worth keeping on. I don't want to go into details, but I've personally seen one particular case, at a hosting company I once worked for, where it was no longer worth the time and aggravation to keep a certain customer, despite their (as far as I knew) flawless payment record.. We gave them a month to find another service provider, but there was no way we would allow them to remain a customer after that. As a business, you have the right to deny service to anyone for any reason, aside from certain protected classes such as race and sex. Unless you're broke, you can and should exercise this right to whatever extent it benefits your business. And even if you're broke, sometimes you should consider it.

latch 15y ago

I think the post is slightly unprofessional, but I nonetheless think it does a good job of trying to move beyond the issue. I think people calling for Jules' head are flat our wrong. To the best of my knowledge, he isn't a repeat offender, and now this* has made it unlikely that he will be, without having to fire him (and coincidentally, allowing him to do what this* considers him good at). I'm generally not crazy about "off-with-his-head" mentality.

Terretta 15y ago
> isn't a repeat offender I'd had a glance at the last couple weeks worth of tweets and they seemed generally more "the customer's never right, good riddance" than most official twitter accounts. Smelled like burned out admin to me.

philk 15y ago

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

patio11 15y ago
I can't agree here. Nobody owes the world comments, and most particularly they do not owe the Reddit hivemind the opportunity for a good one-minute hate.
- philk 15y ago
  I agree that nobody owes the world comments but the point of a conciliatory blog post is to make people stop hating you. If they're still hating you to the point where you've had to turn off comments then your post isn't doing its job properly. (I also agree with your earlier post that if you're selling web hosting for $3/month you'll have to deal with quite a few difficult customers. Often the people who pay the least are the hardest to deal with.)
  - tedunangst 15y ago
    What happens if the haters aren't interested in conciliation?
  - Aissen 15y ago
    Except if there's hate inertia: http://abstrusegoose.com/388 http://abstrusegoose.com/388

tptacek 15y ago

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

danielsiders 15y ago
It's a phenomenal case study in how not to do customer service and social media at a small tech company. I think there are a lot of people in the HN community who could learn a thing or two from this discussion.
- khafra 15y ago
  I'd like to think that the number of HNers who could learn is vanishingly small. I believe the appeal is more along the lines of "Jersey Shore for Internet entrepreneurs."
muppetman 15y ago
So because you have the opinion it's faked, you're going to tell the rest of us how we should react and what we find interesting? Thanks, but I'll make my own choice.
- tptacek 15y ago
  I don't think it's faked. I think it's a waste of our time. I think this is an unprofessional tin-can web host grappling with an unprofessional penny-ante web site making an amount of noise completely out of proportion to their relevance. Like I said earlier, the only thing any of us have to learn from these people is: "don't be these people".
joshu 15y ago
I agree. Some idiots were idiots on the Internet. Why is this interesting to hackers?

akent 15y ago

Seems to me like Doug is just digging them deeper.

Vivtek 15y ago

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

tedunangst 15y ago
That's not the subjunctive. You're doing it wrong. For God's sake, learn English.
- Vivtek 15y ago
  Ha! That's sleep deprivation in action. In my defense, although I manage to misname the passive mode, its usage is known to myself.

strathmeyer 15y ago

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

mikezupan 15y ago
funny thing is any site that isn't putting out spam has a 100/100. no reviews needed
corin_ 15y ago
Seems to be 40/100 now, guess they would have done better not to link it to people who are going to review them badly...

daniel_iversen 15y ago

Get over the issue will you! What's done is done, "sh#t happens".. I think the company has taken appropriate steps and I for one would like them NOT to fire (but give him a strike on top of what they already have done) the poor nerd why got so frustrated that he used a totally inappropriate tone with clients.

mtogo 15y ago
> the poor nerd why got so frustrated that he used a totally inappropriate tone with clients. And then canceled the accounts of paying clients, who had done nothing wrong, and deleted all of their information.

rvanniekerk 15y ago

As the Co-founder of a statup that has dealt directly with situations like this in the past, I don't see much wrong with how the situation was handled. You wouldn't expect a restaurant owner to put up with a rude and insulting customer being a dick to restaurant staff, so why should any other service have to put up with it? Some customers just aren't worth the hassle they put out PERIOD. I don't give a shit if you're willing to pay me $9.99 a month, if you purposely go out of your way to insult myself or a member of my team, you don't gain the benefit of using our product, end of story. * Edit * - Just to clarify, I don't see the need for them deleting the previous blog post, if you're going to respond to something in public, you should probably stand behind what you are saying before pushing publish.

starwed 15y ago
This seems to be one of those stories which has mutated. In the original account, the poster says they inquired about a problem, had their account terminated, and then flipped out. Almost every commenter on HN seems to assume that the account termination happened after the flip-out, but from what I can tell that isn't correct?
- wvenable 15y ago
  The fully paid and not in dispute account was suspended (disabled) because of the account owner's twitter comments. The account owner then swore on twitter and so his account was further deleted and all backups destroyed. The story hasn't mutated but the details are subtle.
  - starwed 15y ago
    The chain of events, as originally laid out[1], was: * OP has paypal payment issue with This. * Friend asks them via twitter "That's not cool. Suspending a friends account because of a minor PayPal dispute? When did you get into doing that?" * They respond saying "Please mind your own business."[2] * OP and This* get into a dispute about whether such a response was professional or not. * Both accounts are then suspended. (This part is unclear from the original account. OP says that is at this point his account was suspended, while friend's twitter implies it had been suspended earlier. My guess would be it was originally supposed to be a temporary suspension until payment was worked out?) * OP flips out a bit and swears on twitter. * Backups deleted. ------------------------------- Friend's twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/boriskourt http://twitter.com/#!/boriskourt OP's twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/berfarah http://twitter.com/#!/berfarah [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/jk195/stay_the_fuck_away_from_this_thiswebhostcom/ http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/jk195/stay_the_f... [2] http://i.imgur.com/Hc0Bh.png http://i.imgur.com/Hc0Bh.png

dulse 15y ago

It's amazing to me how incompetent otherwise sophisticated companies are at handling public relations. It's not rocket science, and it's not about who's right. This post comes off as smug, half-hearted, and insulting. Why are they joking and making light of the technical director's unprofessional conduct? Why are they trying to parse how the customer's twitter comeback wasn't justified? Why are they separating the latter part of the post as the "more serious note," thus implying the first half isn't serious? This is serious for the company, whether they know it or not. After reading this post, I come away thinking the company doesn't take this situation seriously, they don't take their customers seriously, and they wouldn't handle my problems seriously if I were a customer. They should have 1) Made a direct, unmitigated apology; 2) Clarified what their company stands for regarding terminating accounts with specific policy improvements, not a promise to review the policy; 3) Left the excuses for Jules out of it; 4) Left out the legal threats to people e-mailing the company (the blog post isn't about the company's problems, it's about the customers' problems); 5) Titled it "An Apology" or "A New Direction" or basically anything besides "Moving On..." which sounds like a command being issued in conjunction with an exaggerated eye roll. Why don't these firms just hire a pr/crisis consultant to help? If they suspect the crisis could cost the company more than a few thousand dollars if not handled correctly, it's a no-brainer. The best-case scenario is that they lose a few thousand dollars improving their public image; the alternative could be losing a chunk of their user base.

larrys 15y ago

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

jdoss 15y ago

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

hoop 15y ago

Customers are sometimes abusive, particularly on support lines. Anyone who works in a service industry needs to learn to deal with that. Even if they don't interact with customers, they should learn the people skills anyhow because really we all have "customers" - even if they are internal to the company. On the other hand, at $3/mo, I'd say "this" could've gone ahead and terminated the hosting of the "painful" customers (keeping backups,) but only doing so at later date and with notice when everyone wasn't so fired up. IMO their "technical director" also needs to be let go. Maybe not today, but after they've had a chance to get a new person trained but more importantly get their domains and accounts transferred into the company's (or its owner's) name. The TD has demonstrated that he's over-reactive. If kept with the company, there's the risk that he further damages the company in the future (even with him being isolated away from customers). If he's let go, there's the risk of overreacting and damaging the company in other ways.

martinkallstrom 15y ago

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

jgeerts 15y ago

For me thiswebhost.com has lost all credibility. A website is a source of income and just cannot be joked with. As gfunk stated, the fact that it became personal for a company is ridiculous. You always will have unsatisfied customers and yes sometimes they will curse at your company, but there can be NO reason to terminate a source of income.

lsc 15y ago

From experience, if you screw up and the other guy responds badly, saying "I screwed up, but the other guy responded poorly" is not going to be received as well as just saying "I screwed up." Only very rarely have I seen more benefit actively defending myself from a customer's accusation rather than apologizing and taking responsibility, even if it was only partly my fault.

pestaa 15y ago
Well, yes, but they felt they need to restore some reputation. (Or would my post be received better if I just said "Well, yes"? :))
- lsc 15y ago
  I'm saying that your reputation usually fairs better if you say "I'm sorry for being an asshole" vs. "I'm sorry for being an asshole, but that other guy was also being an asshole" I mean, the second is usually the case; but as a business, you are expected to be 'the bigger person' and, you know, not delete people's personal data because they are being dicks to you. Defending your actions, in some minds, makes it sound more likely that you'd do it again in the same situation.
  - pestaa 15y ago
    I did both agree with your statements wholeheartedly and reflect on them in the same manner. There was no need to explain it again, but thanks. :)
    - lsc 15y ago
      sorry. I need to watch this tendency to re-state my previous argument when I think someone disagrees with me. I am told I do the same thing in person, and it's just not very productive.