I have very little tolerance for evil overlord webhosting companies. A long time ago in a land far, far away, I had a website hosted over at Angelfire. I managed to generate some traffic by irritating a posse of mothers who Photoshopped deceased babies and entered them into beauty contests. (I am not making this up.) One reported me for copyright violation, which turned out to be true and over 4 years worth of work on my site was completely trashed.
I was livid, I checked the Ts and Cs as provided by Angelfire and found that they were well within their rights. But still, it's a horrible policy. The person answering e-mails at that point very much came off as being 'well, we did you a service that was FREE and now we don't like you anymore.'
At that point I realized the favor goes both ways. The more sites they host, the more likely they are to get folks in to see the advertising. Try explaining that to their employees though. They also lost a customer. When I had my original site I was too poor to pay for hosting. Now I have a full time job and would never use a Lycos or Angelfire paid service because of that initial first impression. Even though I was a free customer, I was still a customer and we all deserve much better than that.
It's not so much about the actual site deletion, it's the lack of communication about when they hit the 'confirm' button. One day I just found my site down, had to e-mail and received the rather unpleasant answer. Would it have been too much trouble for a warning? Or an e-mail letting me know? Apparently, yes. I had similar problems with my old host Valcato (Warning, site uses sound.)
With Valcato any time I wanted an answer to a question it took me ages to get through to anyone. That was for downtime, hosting questions (they used CPanel and I was bewildered,) billing, passwords... or just about everything. The straw on the camel's back was when the number on my debit card changed and I forgot to update my account information. My site was instantly deleted with no recourse. Then they had the gall to try and charge me 6 months later under the next billing cycle. It took several angry e-mails over another 6 months to get them to stop trying to charge me.
My current host is also rather lacking in the communication department. This downtime and even scheduled downtime in the past was a trial of pain and error. The last time I had to explain over and over again that the reason they could see my website was because they were at the same location. Outside of their network, it timed out. I never actually did get a satisfactory answer as to why.
It makes me wonder where the huge amount of effort would come from just for someone to send out an e-mail letting us know we're down. This wait for the customer to fire off exasperated, sarcastic, barely polite or just plain abusive e-mails game doesn't seem to be a very good strategy. By time we've found out, we're pissed off and unwilling to make concessions. A pre-emptive approach would be a hell of a lot better and would probably keep some from asking for their money back.
Right now they're just letting us e-mail, call and post on the tech support board with no explanation. Way to go guys. Way to go.
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