Re: [PLUG] Looking for a new hosting company

[Douglas Muth <doug.muth@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 4:03 PM, Michael Lazin <microlaser@gmail.com> wrote:
> Umm, I sent that email to the customer who made that blog.  In defense of
> 1and1 our dedicated server support is in the U.S., and, IMHO opinion I
> provide very good support for customer's with hacked webspaces or to
> customers that are moved to auxilliary servers because of the load their
> site causes.  If the customer had bothered to ask me I would have gladly
> looked at his logs and told him what the source of the load is.  We send out
> that generic email and await a response from the customer.  Shared hosting
> is shared hosting, no one person may treat the server as if it is their own.

Well, while I have your ear, may I make a suggestion? How about making
the template(s) a little more detailed?

For example, saying "excessive resource use" while true, is a little
vague.  While the customer certainly can ask you for more details,
it's clear that in all cases they won't, and lead complete jerks like
me to draw inaccurate conclusions about your company. :-)

Here are a couple of ideas for wording/phrasing that could make emails
like that a little clearer:

- "One or more of your scripts consumed excessive bandwidth in the
last 24 hours: /path/to/bigfile.html (15 GB), /path/to/slashdotted.php
(5 GB)"

- "One or more of your SQL queries caused excessive database load:
SELECT * FROM bigtable, biggertable (175 seconds)"

- "Your webserver appears to have been broken into and files were
altered by the attacker: evil.js, evil.php"


Some of those ideas might be more difficult than others to implement
(the SQL one would also most certainly require digging through the
slow query log, for example), but I think the return on your
investment is that customers would feel much happier at having the
specific problem pointed out to them, which would probably lead to
customers being less unhappy and remaining customers longer, I would
think.

Of course, I'm a technology guy, not a business guy.  If you think
what I just suggested is the dumbest thing you ever heard, please
don't hesitate to tell me that either. :-)

-- Doug
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