Thanks for great recovery and status updates

[jph]

Hey Jodo,

Today's switch crash was a bummer, but many kudos on your recovery and especially for keeping everyone informed on the status.

Everything on jodopulse.com worked like a charm to keep me informed, and your regular posts on the status were very helpful in letting me keep my clients calm and informed.

Again, bummer it was a 3 hour outage, but I couldn't ask for better customer service during the crisis. Thanks.

 

[Stephen]

Hey Jodo,

Today's switch crash was a bummer, but many kudos on your recovery and especially for keeping everyone informed on the status.

Everything on jodopuls.com worked like a charm to keep me informed, and your regular posts on the status were very helpful in letting me keep my clients calm and informed.

Again, bummer it was a 3 hour outage, but I couldn't ask for better customer service during the crisis. Thanks.

Thanks, but pretty disappointed in it myself, there is still some work to do however, a few stragglers we are working on now. I will be busy this month working on hows and whys of this, and prevention.

 

[antic]

Yep, thanks also for that Stephen. See also my new thread about the "thanks" button.

Which is still in moderation... Isn't there a setting for just moderating users with < 20 posts or something? Would save you a lot of work there instead of moderating *all* new threads.

 

[jph]

I take it all back.

You suspended my account today, because I think YOU screwed up my credit card info.

All my clients are rightfully outraged and so am I.

 

[Stephen]

I take it all back.

You suspended my account today, because I think YOU screwed up my credit card info.

All my clients are rightfully outraged and so am I.

?(

We don't even have access to the credit card info to do anything with it?

I am sorry, but we don't go around doing things like this, it would be counter productive to make customers angry...

The system sends 3-4 notices before a suspend, and multiple notices before a delete after the suspend. I have personally gotten notices in the last 2 days from the system on both clusters, so I know it is working properly.

 

[antic]

jph, I don't think that kind of problem can be sorted out in the support forums.
You probably should get in touch with sales.

I have personally gotten notices in the last 2 days from the system on both clusters, so I know it is working properly.

Tsk tsk Stephen, you really should keep your account payments up to date.

 

[jph]

Fine, I didn't mean you changed it intentionally, I thought maybe something got lost inexplicably or something... but fine, not your fault that the card expired.

But still a ridiculous reaction and policy on your end.
I got one email on October 3, then today tits-up and clients calling me from 6:30 am.

That is a ridiculous grace period, and not enough effort on your part to figure out a problem with a very long-time reseller to fix a problem before suspending all accounts. Bad enough I had to take the heat for recent issues with down servers, and growing pains during the migration, but this was a slap in the face I didn't need.

 

[Stephen]

Fine, I didn't mean you changed it intentionally, I thought maybe something got lost inexplicably or something... but fine, not your fault that the card expired.

But still a ridiculous reaction and policy on your end.
I got one email on October 3, then today tits-up and clients calling me from 6:30 am.

That is a ridiculous grace period, and not enough effort on your part to figure out a problem with a very long-time reseller to fix a problem before suspending all accounts. Bad enough I had to take the heat for recent issues with down servers, and growing pains during the migration, but this was a slap in the face I didn't need.

They system is automated, 10 days is not long enough from overdue suspend notice? I am sorry, but we did not target you on this, it has been in place for a long time.

 

[antic]

Automated systems can have big down sides.

If it comes to the attention of sales that long-term customer (I'm one too) has an account issue, one would think a bit of special treatment would be appropriate, as mistakes happen sometimes.. notification email can go to junk mail, etc. Unfortunately automation doesn't often allow for that sort of thing.

When my c/card is about to be renewed, I usually make extra sure in advance it's going to go smoothly.
Never trust automated systems.

But I think flagging special cases is good business. A long term client with lots of customers should be contacted directly if there are any problems.
Just my 2c. Sorry to hear of your problem jph, hope it's sorted out promptly.

 

[Stephen]

Automated systems can have big down sides.

If it comes to the attention of sales that long-term customer (I'm one too) has an account issue, one would think a bit of special treatment would be appropriate, as mistakes happen sometimes.. notification email can go to junk mail, etc. Unfortunately automation doesn't often allow for that sort of thing.

Correct, and we will make an exception and re-enable the account and give time to get paid when such happens. However the system either works 'automated' or 'not automated' and we've gone the not automated way a couple years ago, and with 1000s of resellers, and 1000s customers, it gets messy quickly, and it is beyond a couple people to handle, and far many more billing inquires, along with far past due accounts etc

 

[jph]

Suspensions could require moderation, at least for resellers.

Also, I would prefer that you charge a month in ADVANCE if you are not going to give at least a 30-day grace period for a thing like this. That way there is at least a built-in safety. A phone call or something would also not be out of line as a last step.

 

[Stephen]

Suspensions could require moderation, at least for resellers.

Also, I would prefer that you charge a month in ADVANCE if you are not going to give at least a 30-day grace period for a thing like this. That way there is at least a built-in safety. A phone call or something would also not be out of line as a last step.

There isn't such a feature to do that, and as stated before we've done in past and it is not sustainable to do them manually. A suspend moderation based on criteria set out type queue would be a neat feature, but at this point Hsphere is beyond adding features. It will be something we have to look into for new hosting systems we are working on.

Hsphere also has this annoying 'feature' that it doesn't enable resellers users on reseller unsuspend, really annoying one

 

[antic]

They system is automated, 10 days is not long enough from overdue suspend notice?

Actually, no I don't think it is to be honest.

Domain registrars often provide *weeks* of advance notice. Especially when it comes to reseller hosting, where someone's business is at stake, the notification should be much longer than 10 days. That really is not enough.

If you can change it, and it should be easy to do so, I suggest making it 30 days, sent weekly, for accounts paid 6ths or yearly. 10 days is acceptable for monthly accounts, but any serious reseller will be on 6 or 12 month accounts.

It's better to have well informed customers than surprised ones.
ed: Nobody suggested going manual, just improving the automation.

 

[Stephen]

Actually, no I don't think it is to be honest.

Domain registrars often provide *weeks* of advance notice. Especially when it comes to reseller hosting, where someone's business is at stake, the notification should be much longer than 10 days. That really is not enough.

If you can change it, and it should be easy to do so, I suggest making it 30 days, sent weekly, for accounts paid 6ths or yearly. 10 days is acceptable for monthly accounts, but any serious reseller will be on 6 or 12 month accounts.

It's better to have well informed customers than surprised ones.
ed: Nobody suggested going manual, just improving the automation.

You are sent a statement notice at 30 days, this is a 10 days SUSPEND notice at the point of overdue. at 30 days, you'd be looking at the possibility of someone owing 2-3x their monthly service at once.

Domain registrar is a totally different function since it is a yearly, or even 2/5/10 year process with a set fee without addons, and they prebill you for that. It is understandable that they give 90 days notice. We cannot predict what will be used 90 days in advance to do that.

If I am 10 days past due on my bills, services start going off (cell phones, power, water etc, all like that, and this is no different it is a utility type service, based on a plan + possibly extra usage)

Recently at our new office we went off contract on our electrical service, with no warning at all and the next months bill was 3x more due to off contract pricing. I was not happy at all, and they didn't budge on it, so I had to eat it, and make sure now I am in a long term power contract so that doesn't happen again.

That said, there are some good ideas here that I want to implement, we are looking for a billing platform for new options in hosting, and even for transitioning the Hyper-V billing there, and I will add this to the desired functions list to have criteria based suspend moderations

 

[antic]

We cannot predict what will be used 90 days in advance to do that.

That's fair enough... but perhaps you can make a database of c/card expiry dates and just send a special automated email to people 30 days before then, to remind them to update their info. Depends how often this happens I guess.

If I am 10 days paste due on my bills, services start going off

Wow, that's harsh. Here, if I forget to pay a phone/power bill or something, they send an overdue notice 2 or so weeks later. I think they even send another one after that, or give you a phone call if it's over a month overdue. We don't mind regulating industry here.