A polite request to hosting companies
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Dear Hosting companies (present company excepted)
Many years ago a lot of the sites you hosted on your servers were personal web sites containing nothing but family pictures, animated gifs and the odd (in both meanings of the word) family newsletters.
Recently however, there are an increasing number of people who are using your services to run their businesses, build their online brand / identity and generally try to earn a living whilst maintaining a professional and business-like online presence.
Not all of us can afford our own servers, so we gladly take up your offer of shared hosting and hand over our pennies, with the dream that one day, just maybe, we too can be on a dedicated server.
Then, one day we strike it lucky and write that one post or find that single product / advertising technique that works and finally we get noticed. People start to visit our site, ask for our advice, order our products and even, god-forbid, pay us for the privilege.
People start to talk about us, even rave about us. We try hard to maintain a professional image, answer all of our emails politely and help our customers with their problems. For we are in business and that is what businesses do.
But then one day the orders and the emails stop. Have we been forgotten already? Are people really that fickle?
A visit to our web site reveals the reason. A large message at the top of the screen "This account has been suspended, please contact the billing department".
Oh my, how long has that been there? How many of my customers / clients have seen that message? What has it done to our reputation? How many orders have we lost? How many people will think we are out of business and go elsewhere?
So this is a polite request to web hosting companies everywhere. Please think of your customers and change your "Account suspended", "Bandwidth exceeded" and other messages. I guess a lot of them come as standard with cPanel (so this call also goes out to the cPanel developers).
How about having a nice "Sorry about the inconvenience. We’ll be right back" message like the Apple store uses, or even just a blank page.
Please remember, it is OUR customers that will see that page, not yours. It is us, however, who will have to deal with the aftermath.
Thank you for your time, you may now return to your desks.
Barry
ps. Why not pass this post on to your hosting company or friends for their input?
September 11th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
I completely agree. I recently ran into this situation when they moved my site to a new server. The information in the e-mail made no mention that the address for secured connections on the shared server would change, so the e-commerce portion of the site displayed the “Account Suspended” page. How ugly!
September 12th, 2007 at 9:18 am
My host (WebFaction) got it right and they actually give you a choice in the control panel for what happens when you go over the limit. You can either choose to have your site stay up and pay more, or your site disabled. If it gets disabled you get to choose which message will be displayed !
September 13th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
@Mike: The WebFaction approach seems like a nice solution.
This has only happened to me once, so far, after a bad SQL query started slowing down the server (though luckily I had already moved to my current hosts, and they display a blank page). Though I have seen quite a few examples of people, through no fault of their own, getting hit by a lot of Digg or Slashdot traffic.
Whilst I agree that Web hosting companies have a duty to protect all of the clients on a shared server, being nice about it doesn’t cost much.
As far I can figure, a small html page with a nicely styled message on it can’t use up much more bandwidth than the current “Account suspended” pages that are being displayed.
September 27th, 2007 at 11:16 am
I completely agree with this post, is there anybody to solve this.I will wait for the reply.