Jason Hatch: YOU SUCK.

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

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.