this whole your-site debacle has depressed the hell out of me.
i see while i was away jason, the owner, had a good time demeaning me and insulting my intelligence (not that it isn’t totally undeserved).
blech. i am not even going to get into it and justify anything. ‘sides i got a nastygram from jason and he’s threatened to sue me for libel. this most definitely cracks my ass right up, because i was something of a first amendment scholar in my younger years.
but again, i don’t want to get into it.
i am done with your-site (thankfully) and lucky for them, they are done with me.
and they all lived happily ever after.
the end.
(Visited 19 times, 1 visits today)
was it good for you?
I think it’s weird Jason is reading your site…. kind-of creepy to me.
i think it’s weird that the president and owner of your-site.com doesn’t have better things to do with his time than threaten to sue me for libel and post comments to my site.
Actually I see it as a priority to defend my company against malicious threats and slander. If I didn’t care, I’d be doing what most people do on a friday night…
sitting at home surfing the web?
jason,
of course it is a priority to defend your company, but your business dealings should be kept private, even when a consumer is unhappy. there are plenty of sites bashing microsoft around the web, but you don’t see bill gates posting dumbass messages on all of them.
Hey Greg…
I like you.
Greg,
This whole thing started out where I was trying to explain that it was a DNS issue that was causing her to get our site, not an unethical practice. I think that was pretty reasonable. Then I went back and forth with Tyson a bit, and as you can see it wasn’t bad — Tyson and I were actually getting somewhere.
You’ll also recall when Tyson suggested we go private (in another thread), I agreed wholeheartedly.
It wasn’t until an inflamatory post containing a private e-mail I sent Jodi appeared here where things got out of hand. It deserved an explanation and I responded with an explanation, which I think was appropriate. I have stopped responding since then, which I also think is appropriate.
Bill Gates probably wouldn’t have cared about this because he is so big. And if he did, he would have just had his legal eagles go after the site owner without any warning whatsoever. We’re much smaller than that, in fact we’re smaller than most people here think we are. Using Bill Gates is a poor example because he’s probably a million times larger than I am.
People keep asking why I’m wasting my time on such a small site. Since Jodi’s site obviously stood out in our system usage reports (which is what started this whole thing), I had every reason to believe it was a busy site. Plus I can see that Jodi is a respected columnist at several other sites, so I have every reason to take this seriously.
I don’t see any harm in defending my company in public, especially since it’s clear that there are at least 3 current customers of mine that frequent this site, and probably much more.
Would you prefer I just stayed silent as if I had something to hide? Should I have just laughed this whole thing off?
I regret that the situation has gone as far as this, but I must protect the interests of my company. The remarks on the front page of this site should not have gone unanswered.
I’ve given Jodi the opportunity to call me and clear this up. I honestly think that 10 minutes on the phone will clear up much of this. I don’t expect Jodi to be completely happy afterwards but it should be worth her time. I hope she calls…
-Jason
I actually can see your point of view, Jason. But I don’t think that if one person says “I hate Coke” that everyone would stop drinking coke, or if someone said “I hate woopie coushions” that all kids would stop using them. What I see is that Jodie gave her opinion about her server, and Jason got worried, which I can completely understand. Although Jodie could have reacted in a different way, like switching servers, she decided to post her opinion. The constitution does not allow people to sue over things like this. I see both sides equally. I think this is just a big mess up that needs to be cleaned. I love Jodi, and I don’t think any less of your company, Jason. =)
i understand all that jason, i just think in “defending” yourself, you have made your company look worse than it actually is. the biggest part of public relations is knowing when to shut up. you should have just let jodi have her say, gone out and had a drink to calm down, and gotten a good nights sleep. i don’t really think that much less of your-site.com, but i just think that publicly commenting back was the wrong tactic on your part.
i understand your company is not that large…you mentioned 17 employees and roughly 11,000 customers.
in addition, it is a basic courtesy of business not to say that a customer owes you an apology. i’m not one of those people who believes the customer is always right, but manners are manners.
on a side note, i found it unprofessional where you basically kicked tyson out of your-site.com for doing nothing more than correspond with you.
i think you may also want to look up the definition of slander — tyson’s correspondence with you probably wouldn’t have applied. i’m sure when you were consulting your lawyer as you said above he/she informed you of this.
Greg,
Thanks for the detailed feedback.
Tyson called us “unethical dorks” based on 3rd party information in another thread. Our policy is simple: once a customer becomes a liability, we cut our losses. In fact our policy is broader than that: even if he said that to a staff member privately, he would have been asked to leave.
Tyson and I have worked things out and it’s up to him if he chooses to stay or not. I never threatened to sue Tyson for slander. I never felt the need to mention Tyson to my lawyer. I never shut Tyson’s site down.
At my company, the customer isn’t always right. The money they pay us doesn’t include the right to be abusive to the system or to my staff. If a customer is abusive to my staff, they are asked to leave. This is not some arbitrary policy, it’s a policy that was formed after four years of having customers that monopolize and abuse our staff. An abusive customer can ruin a staff member?s day and affect the quality of the responses s/he gives to other customers. Therefore, out of fairness to staff and our other customers, we have a low tolerance for abuse.
Also, I don’t think explaining that we didn’t purposefully advertise on Jodi’s domain and explaining how DNS affected this issue hurt us. I don’t think explaining to Tyson what we did and why we did it hurt us. I think hiding and refusing to give answers is worse, and is the typical “corporate” response people would expect.
When Joe initiated the “kangaroo court”, I chose to shut up after giving one response. Nothing I can say to Joe will make any difference. That was the appropriate point to “shut up” that you mentioned.
My reaction to Jodi was based on a number of things. I didn’t see this as a flame on some obscure board. I reviewed several of Jodi’s sites and followed several links and I learned that Jodi is an author on several sites that appear to have some exposure. There was no reason to believe that this was going to be an isolated event.
Jodi has since privately explained her position to me in detail, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s settled.
People here think that we are an evil corporation because we took action on 54 of our users. Those 54 users were using more than our 7,000+ other users combined and were causing a serious problem. We were in an emergency situation and we needed to take action. As Tyson pointed out, we should have noticed this before it became a problem, and he was right; however, we had other issues that preoccupied us for the few weeks leading up to this incident, such as mail problems and a backlog of support that accompanied it. I was busy putting out that fire and when the smoke cleared, we realized the servers were running slower than they should have and customers were complaining.
We tried to do the right thing by giving everyone 4 days notice and a low-cost alternative to a dedicated server. Most providers give 1-2 days notice and don’t give a lower cost solution as an alternative: either leave or get a dedicated server. We worked hard to put another server up and move these customers to it and we gave everyone plenty of time: we extended the 4 days to nearly two weeks. In fact, we still haven’t taken action on the vast majority of those customers. Technically, we didn’t have to do this as our CGI resource limits are published clearly in our AUP and we were allowed to shut these users down on the spot.
Jodi didn’t get 4 days notice, she got less than a day. I’m not sure why this happened. Although, as I’ve stated before, we could have technically shut her down, I view this as a “mistake” on our end because we were trying to make things as easy as possible for everyone involved. We wanted to give everyone as much notice as possible.
In the future, we’ll avoid this problem by automatically warning people before their usage reaches a critical level. We started working on this before Jodi cancelled.
Also, we don’t “Charge by the process”. The 10,000 process limit on the semi-dedicated server represents a 1/40 slice of the server. We charge by the slice. If you use 1/2 a dedicated server, you get charged 1/2. I think this was a pretty friendly solution compared to kicking everyone off or giving them a whole $300+/mo dedicated server as their only option.
One more thing, Greg. As a customer of Your-Site, would you rather I spend my time working on improving the service by adding extra features like web based e-mail, or would you rather I spend my time here arguing under duress or with an abusive customer?
I hope this clarifies things a bit. At any rate, I think we’ve kicked this issue around enough. I don’t want to clutter up Jodi’s board any more so I suggest we take this private.
-Jason
no need, i was just mentioning things that stuck out in my mind when you asked what you could have done differently. i think the situation became inflamatory very quickly, probably on the part of both ends…but it’s over and done now.
Sounds good to me Greg. The only thing I’d like to add is I think I handled things here pretty calmly all things considered. I walked into an already hostile and inflammatory situation to make my case and despite it being made clear to me I wasn’t welcome and despite some hostility, belligerence, profanity and unfounded accusations from other people, I think I’ve kept my cool in comparison.
I would like to say that Jason Hatch is a complete and total waste of the biological processes it takes to keep him alive. That energy would be much better served lighing a hospital in El Salvador where theoretical 7-year-old Jose is eagerly awaiting a vaccine for smallpox or gonarreah or some shit like that.
Jason Hatch: YOU SUCK.