> think long and hard before you get into the business of taking $3 a month from people who are demographically similar to Redditors
This is so true. Whenever I have a sale of one of my apps and lower the price to $1.99 or something in that range I'm tempted to disable my support mail account.
Cheap people tend to get a huge sense of entitlement when they pay you one or two bucks.
To be fair they did buy it.
If you disable your support account then also write a fat bold and _short_ statement such as:
THIS IS PROVIDED WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY AND NO SUPPORT WILL BE GIVEN.
And don't hide that inside 1, 2 or 50 pages of text of course.
Then it's all fine. If you don't, then support is going to be expected, no matter the price and that makes complete sense to me.
Yeah, and feel free to fire your pathological customers.
But what they did was close this guy's account and delete his backups without warning. It seems they then did the same to his friend for shooting his mouth off on twitter. That's beyond "handled poorly", that's unprofessional and unethical.
I don't think many people on HN are at risk of cursing their customers and deleting their data, but many people are repeatedly at risk of undercharging, so that's where I focused my comments. I think "Don't curse at your customers, even if it would be very satisfying giving how much of a raging git they are being" pretty much goes without saying.
It wasn't awesome. But we're talking about a $3/month host here, is that something you should rely on for backups, even before your account is terminated? If the abusive customer didn't keep a local copy, well, now he's probably learnt to keep a local copy.
Having said that, if you choose to run a low cost hosting service, you should know that your customers are going to be greedy entitled bitches, and you should deal with that fact in a professional matter. Otherwise, just get into some other line of business.
Again, it's worse than "not awesome", it's unprofessional and unethical.
If you commit to provide a service, whether you're charging $1 or $100k per month, there are some minimum standards of behavior you should hold yourself to. This isn't "you get what you pay for" because the host went down. Maliciously deleting backups that you're supposedly responsible for, over a twitter slapfight, is unethical. No matter what.
Do you know that he was actually responsible for backing up this data? This hosting plan costs less than some places charge just for maintaining backups.
They did have the backups - and said so - and then deleted them just to be assholes. So it's moot whether they were responsible for backing up the data; the issue is they deleted it on purpose just to hurt.
They had already terminated their service agreement with this person. If I were a low-margin hosting reseller, I wouldn't bother to keep around the data of ex-customers either.
No, you definitely shouldn't rely on a $3/month host for backups. However, that does not in any way mean that the $3/month host should not also keep reliable backups. Just because one party can't count on it doesn't mean the other party isn't responsible for it.
$3/month host here, is that something you should rely on for backups
Forget about how much you think it costs to host your backups. Think about how much you backups mean to you. What would happen if you didn't have access to your backups?
But you probably wouldn't use $3 hosting to begin with. The kind of customers who are attracted to this are exactly the kind of people who don't have backups and expect great service for $3. (Because, after all, $3 is a million times more expensive than Google, and Google is pretty reliable...)
If a serves offers stuff for free, or against ridiculously low prices, the rule "if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, you are the product" usually applies.
These aren't customers with an "odd mindset", these are people that believe that they are an essential part of your product, usually in the form of advertiser fodder, and therefor you owe them. The assumption that you somehow profit from offering something for free is not a strange one, hence there is nothing pathological about these people demanding service and respect in the same way paying customers do.
However, paying customers know more or less exactly what to expect, because they can relate it to the amount of $$$ they pay. Customers of "free" services have no idea how much they are worth, so they tend to "negotiate" by aiming high. Yes, this is unpleasant, but it's very naive to be surprised about it, and a little disingenuous to be offended by it.
Maybe you see it that way, but you're not pathological. I had people demanding such or so or they were going to demand a refund.
...
Granted, not many.
Also, the principle "you're not the customer, you're the product", while well-known to you cynical kids today, had not yet really been invented in 1999.
This is so true. Whenever I have a sale of one of my apps and lower the price to $1.99 or something in that range I'm tempted to disable my support mail account.
Cheap people tend to get a huge sense of entitlement when they pay you one or two bucks.