Technology Toolkit

In a world where just one grumbling ex-customer can create havoc for any web hosting service with an unfair, biased “this web host sucks” type of page, it can be an amazing business-killer to just have one angry customer. What’s a web host to do?

Clearly web hosting companies have a thin line to walk when it comes to customer relations. Even one lazy or disrespectful customer service rep can mean 100 negative comments and dozens of angry websites down the road. So, while low prices stuffed with good features can attract many customers, the key to retention and long-term reputation growth, is all in the customer service.

Especially in a time of crisis, the management of any web hosting company must keep their cool and just take some time out of their day to plan a good strategy to deal with it. It’s shockingly amazing how much little though is sometimes put into a response to a fiasco in this web hosting industry that is so utterly dependent on a good reputation.

A good example is the January 15, 2008 DreamHost billing issue which had millions of dollars worth of erroneous charges were made to nearly EVERY one of it’s customers due to a typo. DreamHost did take care of the billing issue and refund the money, and did it quickly; good move DreamHost. However, their blog post explaining the issue may have done irreparable harm. DreamHost employee Josh Jones decided to use Homer Simpson and “whoops” to preface it. Of course if you were one of the hundreds of people living paycheck to paycheck amongst their users who happened to be overcharged on an account low with money (as many were), so that even with the refund you are going to be paying overdraft fees: it’s not so funny.

Or even worse, for many users it was charged to a credit card and will cause them to pay extra interest every month, due to the deceitful practice of credit card companies meaning the DreamHost refund would pay off the older, zero or low interest debt first, then the new, high interest debt just suffered due to DreamHost’s error could conceivably cause many DreamHosting users to pay dozens of dollars extra a month until their balance is completely paid off.

In not writing out and thinking over what possible negative effects the customers suffered, and then understanding that humor would be unacceptable for a response, DreamHost made a critical error. It would of been especially important to avoid the type of blatant Homer Simpson “whoops” style of humor used during the DreamHost billing crisis that effected every single one of their users in a negative way. In so doing, DreamHost management caused a loss of many important and longtime customers that could of otherwise been avoided by simply strategizing their response.

A good response could have even used some humor deep within the post, but it would be inappropriate to have a laugh about the overall situation. While many customers who didn’t suffer overdraft fees or other hardships may be able to laugh it off after they get their refund, those who suffered the fees or increased interest payments would feel insulted by the humorous language in the post.

As one commenter, Adam, stated “I think the biggest insult in all of this is the ‘we are really sorry, but we’ll act cute about it’ reaction we are getting. Its not a time for you to be acting cute about your mistake.” Indeed, it was not, and even a casual observer such as Adam could see that. Why couldn’t DreamHost management?

Microsoft is King. Certainly in the PC market, Microsoft has dominated and defeated most competition. Only in recent years, thanks to a savvy marketing department and the abysmal marketing of Vista, Apple began to make ground against Microsoft. The only other competitors are from the Unix variety.

And this is where the split in web hosting occurs. The majority of web hosting services tend to be Linux, due to the lower cost, and added security of using that operating system. However, Microsoft, being as it is, had developed proprietary software that cannot be run “as is” on Linux based systems. The most prominent of these being Active Server Pages (ASP).

Today, perhaps the majority of webmasters will agree that JSP exceeds ASP, however since Microsoft has already gotten many webmasters to use ASP, not all of them are willing to make the switch. Hence, the web hosting provider’s quandry. In order to grab this large market of potential customers, web hosts have only two choices. Either to install a Virtual Private Server with Chilisoft ASP, or buy a windows server for those customers.

The first option, installing a Virtual Private Server with Chilisoft can be expensive, Chilisoft seem to no longer be for sale, having once gone for nearly $500. Now Sun as of June 2007 is no longer even offering Chilisoft ASP for sale, requiring perhaps that you buy one of their servers (usually in excess of $1,500) though private deals with web hosting companies might be possible.

In the event a company somehow does manage to get Chilisoft ASP onto one of their servers, the VPS cannot support both Chilisoft and Cold Fusion, which may exclude some users from it.

The second option may be more practical: simply buy a windows server. However the process of managing dedicated servers or shared hosting servers can be quite drastically different on a Windows versus Linux based system. This usually means hiring a new employee to manage the new responsibilities that entails.

In the end, the web hosting company will have to decide: will the profits from the new ASP users exceed the potential costs of installing chilisoft or managing a windows server? Will those costs be passed onto users? Will that make the web hosting service no longer competitive with cheap web hosting services’ prices?

With the potential need to hire new employees to manage the windows systems, or added expenses from chilisoft, which will already increase the burden on one of your Linux systems, it would be a difficult choice. The web hosting service will have to decide what the potential gains in customers could be from making that leap to supporting ASP, and whether that outweighs the significant costs.