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Jeff Staff was having a bad day. It was the anniversary of the date when a shitty chinglish ticket killed his mother.
Is Jeff just a Staff member or is his full name really Jeff Staff?
His name is Jeff Stafford, is just that SpeedyKVM from being too speedy at everything, quickly typed his name and accidentally left out the "ord".
What a shame, I was hoping for an awesome aptronym!
Because once people decide on their biases the facts are irrelevant when they see an opportunity to hit the "broken record" button. Case in point:
Don't need facts or evidence anymore, just an opportunity to jump up and yell "me too" when someone they hate is mentioned. I noticed it was like that on WHT when I worked at HG. It could be the customer's fault unless we were the host, then the customer was always right.
Goes both ways as those preferring to conveniently ignore the shitty attitude of provider are also people
Because you could've known that prior to ordering by reading some reviews. Providers on the other hand only find out about shitty attitudes by their clients after a while.
Yep. Clearly a scenario in which several community members on two sides have decided their stance on a complaint based solely on the perspective of other events and their associated bias. I would say "myself included" but I would have gladly taken up your cause despite my preferences or feelings, had the facts worked more in favor of such a position. Ryan is all too familiar with me texting him my opinions in such events. As it stands, the remaining valid complaint is not liking their communication style. Meh. Old news.
Read through the thread again. Here's my conclusion:
AT&T has a policy where if you cuss out their support or something they have the right to immediately end your contact.
Companies don't have an obligation, especially if it's stated in their TOS, to continue providing support for you if they decide they don't want to for whatever reason.
This is not uncommon with US companies, Vultr, another VPS provider did the same to someone who argued with their support and they were also from another country.
I've heard of banks closing a persons account and sending them a check in the mail with their entire balance just because they didn't want that person as customer.
Best is to just move on and find another host
:-) Dude asked for account to be closed, we closed it.
We understand that some people need a safe space, so we've created a coupon "SafeSpace" for 30% off any 1,2,3 year plans.
Many thanks to @TheLinuxBug for being our number 1 thread bumper over the past couple of years, I'm pretty sure that he alone has gotten us more sales than any other referrer. Keep up the good work!
It sounds like the VPS was already suspended by the time the OP asked for the refund. So the responsibility for suspending a running service without concrete justification is still on SpeedyKVM. Whether a more pliant customer could have gotten it straightened out afterwards is immaterial: OP shouldn't have found himself in that situation in the first place.
found loophole for getting out of 2 year contract
We will keep running our fraud checks as we see fit based on years of experience which includes suspending a several hours old VPS during a credit card check, because those are the critical hours in which abusers typically send out mass SPAM, ddos, or DD abuse etc affecting other clients on a node.
We care more about existing customer's quality of service than onboarding of somebody who has a fit about verifying their credit card. That is not going to change. Customer selection is, and always has been, a critical part of our business success and stability. A lot of people don't like that (the people we reject), but more people (the existing clients) do appreciate it.
/thread for me
Your attitude is simply appalling. I can understand that OP gave you the choice to close his account and refund if you cannot provide him service (despite producing his ID and paying you in full) but simply no remorse over mr.Jeff denigrating OP in the process?
If this premium customer service comes as a standard with your un-managed VPS plans then prospective customers have an added bonus with the new coupon SafeSpace. It doesn't just discount the VPS cost, it discounts client's self-respect also.
The OP had just no way to comply with what you asked for verifying his CC. How do you send scan of a VCC? Calling it a fit is audacious. If you don't like vcc/prepaids, don't accept them.
You can have the product in pending status during those critical hours, sounds much more logical than wasting several hours of customer's lives who could be using someone else's service instead.
I very much appreciate that there is no such thing as any "neighbor effect" on any Incero product. I chose well, well before having any personal ties to Incero. Well before I would recognize your face, and before Ryan knew the company existed. It is and has remained where I go for quality. Even when I was upset over a technical issue in the beginning, it was handled with class and we were treated like business partners in the process.
Several people like to bust my chops for the personal connections, but those formed later as a result of a choice of provider, and I'll never make any effort to hide it. Yes, I can honestly say the Incero DC tech has been my best friend for over 15 years, and that Gordon has grilled burgers and hot dogs for me and my whole family. Damn right MXroute will continue grow into something that causes mutual success for me and Incero.
Do you not have monitoring to detect that? And what does it have to do with the person's credit card? Why didn't you check the card earlier, if you thought there might be an issue with it?
Obviously it's fine to suspend someone when actual abuse occurs. If other hosts can do that and you can't, that says something about your competence or lack of it.
@willie I really have a very simple challenge for you. Start a low priced VPS company. I'm dead serious. I'm not mocking you or anything. But you are so passionately opinionated about how they should be run, I really think you would enjoy the opportunity to be more than a commentator. I'd love for you to put your opinions to practice. If you end up showing everyone how it's done in the process, well no one loses in that.
I don't need to do that, since plenty of existing companies are doing it perfectly well. I've had VPS with at least a dozen companies by now without encountering this type of problem with any of them. Some of them have screwed up and deadpooled, but at least they didn't go out of their way to mess up their own product. I don't understand why SpeedyKVM is supposed to get a pass when other companies (whose prices are at least as low) don't do that type of stuff.
You're asking me to show that something can be done in order to prove that it's not impossible. I already know that it's not impossible since every hosting company except SpeedyKVM already does it. It's a mystery to me why you think it's such a high standard.
Look at it from the hosting side. Customer opens pre-sales ticket, wants to buy a VPS but has some annoying special requirements, can you accommodate? Consider three possible outcomes:
1) You agree to the requirements, person buys VPS and becomes a steady and low-hassle customer.
2) You don't agree, person doesn't buy your VPS and goes somewhere else.
3) You agree, person buys VPS, pays for it, starts to use it but then invents MORE crazy requirements, does a Paypal chargeback until you meet the new requirements, abuses you through tickets etc.
Can we agree that #1 is fine, #2 is normal course of business, but #3 is bullshit even ignoring the cost of chargebacks? Paying for something and then unilaterally reversing the payment is much worse than not paying in the first place. That is closest to what SK has done here.
Don't provision the Vps during the fraud check. If he pass the fraud check , give him the Vps. If he is proven abusing your service, terminate him without refund. I think that's how most provider deal with new customer.
I literally never seen a provider doing a fraud check after a service is delivered. Well, if that's how you works, then at least tell your customer how much hours do you conduct your "fraud" check. Because the customer has totally no idea if they pass your fraud check, or they still in fraud check phase.
And how many people have had service with SpeedyKVM without encountering this type of problem either? You don't know what any company does all day long unless you work there, and 1-2 complaints per year is actually a really solid number for anyone doing high volume. For all you know, the most significant difference is the volume and the rest is merely an equivalent volume to complaint ratio to another provider that you have no complaints about. Maybe, also, one of those providers you like doesn't make use of venues like this and perhaps then the customers don't know where to complain to in order to gain your approval, or where they are complaining you don't frequent. Perhaps, even better, a host you think is fine does the same thing but the random customers who have complained did so in broken English and no one understood them. This theory is, at minimum, as factual as anything you've stated.
Every company other than SpeedyKVM handles account verification differently? Interesting. What qualifies you to make that statement? I know the answer though: Your perception from viewing 1-2 complaints per year on LET and allowing them to accumulate in your head, and the lack of similar complaints on LET about other providers in the same time frames. TBH, that's not solid evidence, nor is the sample size significant. I think you need to check your facts. I know how you "feel" about this, but you're projecting your feelings into statements of fact, and I propose that you have gathered no such facts.
The more customers you have, the more complaints you sometimes will have. Sometimes, however, how many customers complain in public venues that you happen to frequent is no more significant than a roll of the dice. It's really easy to forget about all of the people who are not complaining also. If, for example, SpeedyKVM is doing 100x the volume of RandomHost1 and RandomHost1 has 1 complaint here in 4 years, while SpeedyKVM has 8 complaints in 4 years, those numbers are actually not bad. Context is important. Just like back in the day when ChicagoVPS was growing. We had a lot of complaints here, yet none of us ever considered how many people weren't complaining. We never actually considered the volume of complaints vs estimates of sales volume. Why not? Because we, as a community, have rarely been interested in deep facts. It helps that we also don't have the figures, but one can reasonably assume that someone like SpeedyKVM is doing higher volume than say....PioHost. Some safe assumptions can at least be made to begin to make comparisons of data for the purpose of entertainment and conversation at the least.
To drive it home, let's say these are sales figures for three hosts, over the course of 3 years:
RandomHost1 = 3,000
RandomHost2 = 300
RandomHost3 = 30
RandomHost1 has 4 bad reviews in 3 years. RandomHost2 has 1 bad review in 3 years, and RandomHost3 has had 1 bad review in three years. RandomHost1 has 0.13% bad reviews. RandomHost2 has 0.33% bad reviews. RandomHost3 has 3.33% bad reviews.
LET members often base their opinion around how many bad reviews they see, and to some degree that makes sense. Especially when the subject matter is similar. However, in this example RandomHost1 has a higher percentage of customers not complaining here than either RandomHost2 or RandomHost3. I could, just as easily as anything else, say that RandomHost1 provides the best service, while having the most amount of bad reviews on LET. It's a stretch, one cannot account for the randomness of which customers post reviews, nor can one safely estimate the growth of those review percentages at scale as the sample size is so small for all 3, but I could say it. Anyone can say anything really. Especially when one doesn't have all the facts and prefers to "feel" the truth rather than know it. Colbert explains that trend nicely:
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/63ite2/the-colbert-report-the-word---truthiness
The narrative you're going on about here feels right to you, and it feels right to many others. That's totally okay, I too often share how I feel. I try not to frame it as fact though. I try to frame it as my feeling. That's just my intellectual standard for myself, I know I'm not perfect.
I propose, with little evidence, that they do exactly what a ton of other providers do. They just don't feign professionalism in the tickets when discussing it and that generates a higher percentage of complaints among those caught in the scenario. I also propose that members here can sometimes read the room, and they know which providers they can complain about without being railed on by the member base. That is, knowing which providers are "popular" to hate among outspoken members. Because there are hosts here that are "popular" and therefore this is not a great venue for complaining about them, so people might refrain from doing so. For example, where's the MXroute hate threads? If Colocrossing did this there'd be a hate thread over it:
Or maybe if SpeedyKVM sent this in a ticket to that same person, there'd be a hate thread about that too:
https://paste.jarcloud.pw/mahatofite.pas
Where's my hate threads and bad reviews? People would look at LET as a bad venue for posting them, because look how frequently MXroute is recommended in threads and spoken of highly. Yet, I do the same things that people will break out pitchforks for if someone came here and gave half of the story (just like I did about myself, only giving half of the story to make myself look bad just now) about a host where disliking them is "popular." That "popularity" is, I propose, something you perceive (without recognizing it's true nature) and use in your mental calculation to judge the quality of a provider using LET as your info source. I'm not saying that's invalid by any means, but I am implying that it is not as strong of a compass as you think it to be, as it only truly points you to shared opinions in a vacuum.
Don't break your arm patting your self on the back or anything...
I am not even going to respond to the rest of that wall of text outside saying I have worked in technical support at a company at least as large as Incero for more than 5 years and we have never treated any customer like the stories I have read about Incero/SpeedyKVM treating their customers here and if we did, we wouldn't be in business.
You act as if treating people the way the OP was treated here is normal or right, when it surely is not. Even when you get a difficult customer that doesn't speak a common language you should have enough respect for that person to take your time and try to help them anyways, even if it means taking extra time with the customer which could have been spent on other tasks. If they request too much of you, explain your policies in a way they can understand and part ways. What you don't do is: take their money, give them services, let them spend several hours using and setting up the service and then interrogate/extort them for their ID and hold their services hostage until they provide 2 forms of identification. Especially since there was no abuse reported (or even originally detected), only some keen suspicion that the transaction 'might be' fraudulent. To boot, there has never been any evidence presented here showing fraud was committed, just that they didn't like the OPs 'whining', you know, one of the most professional reasons I have ever heard for terminating a client.. (rolls eyes loudly).
You and Incero can do with your customers how you see fit, but just don't strut around here and act like how Incero treats people is normal and that other professional hosts do this, because they don't. If they did they would have the exact same backlash you are getting here in this thread, and I can not stress this enough, no one deserves to be treated with such a lack of respect, even if they are a difficult customer.
my 2 cents.
Cheers!
why can't we down vote threads?
Why can't we up vote threads?
Well, I am all for that too, however, we pretty much can when every post bumps as this one will (sadly).
That's more a veto ;-)
Then I won't bother to read yours, especially after you continue to be an insulting prick:
But hey, at least you finally moved above masturbation references. Those really showed how obsessive you are about this topic. Here, I actually accused members of hypocrisy and threw myself under the bus, but you couldn't resist the opportunity to call it "patting your self on the back" which is fairly true to your form. Your words have taken a more mature shape, but your underlying message has never shifted. You firmly hate the referenced provider and anyone associated or who disagrees with you, that is your sole position. You will make up complexity on the fly as needed to satisfy this. Following you may seem noble for a week or so, but it later reveals itself as being obsessive. That is the root, where everything else is merely the opportunity. Don't mistake me for saying the opportunities are not justified, only that they are modular and interchangeable.
If you actually want to read and respond to my individual points, instead of continue to hurl insults, I might be up for actual intellectual discussion. At least, I might be up for reading your posts. You enjoy your virtual pats on the back from members here, what I've said is deeply introspective of our community and how people in it tend to think and act, and people don't like to be called out on things like that. I do, however, consider myself to have a unique position to critique LET trends.
@jarland why is this thread sinking? Its not a offer thread and hasn't gone off-topic either?