How not to treat customers
I’ve maintained my website with the same company for years. There are a lot of reasons I’ve been with this company, but the main ones are that they offer services I like, customer service has been excellent, and the value is good.
This past week, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that my account was suspended and that I was locked out. I called to find out why, and their abuse department told me I was keeping files unrelated to my website there. They explained that it didn’t matter that I was using only a tiny fraction of my quotas. The service is for hosting websites.
One of the selling points of this account is that I have shell access. That allows me to do things you can’t do with a regular account, so I’d sometimes use it as a workspace for things unrelated to my website. Before I started doing these things a few years ago, I called to make sure it was OK since it wasn’t clear in their policies (I’m one of the few people who actually reads user agreements). I was assured it was. I would go so far as to say I was encouraged to do what I wanted.
The company reserves the right to change policies. If they decide they can’t make enough money doing things the way they did in the past, that’s fair enough. But I wasn’t too happy to be blasted off the internet when they changed and I didn’t catch the change. I think a warning would have been in order.
The trick is that I chose this company specifically because of the services it offered me and the price I had to pay. By changing the terms of service so I can’t do something important that I chose them for, they lose most of their edge over the competition.
Aside from that, having to deal with sudden changes forces me to scramble and find a new way to do things — this is bad service in my book. If they need to change to stay competitive, they need to work with their customers and not just flip a switch and expect people to instantly adjust.
I will stick with this outfit for now because my overall experience with this company has been very positive. However, they lost quite a bit of goodwill with this last stunt, so it really needs to be an isolated experience.