Bad Hosting Provider Behavior
November 13, 2008 2:51 pm General Interest, Miscellaneous, RantsSo, I’m not really sure what to do here.
There’s this host. I’m not going to name them, because it isn’t clear to me whether it’s ethical to do so. Four times in the last year, I’ve caught their engineers telling customers who are shared with my employer complete horseshit. They’ve blamed their servers being compromised on our application without a lick of evidence (which turned out to be their own fault after basic inspection), they’ve made absurd claims about our policies, and now they’re making claims that we don’t support MS Exchange, which is of course completely false.
What’s worse, when their engineers get caught being completely full of crap, the company’s response is to isolate those engineers from explaining the claims they made, and instead they’ve been going to my company’s CEO, trying to get me in trouble for telling our shared client to be careful about the advice received from their engineers, despite knowing perfectly well that the advice being handed out by their engineers (particularly during commercially motivated server takeover) was dangerously incorrect.
So I’m not really sure what to do. Do I go public with the names and claims of the individuals involved? Do I just choke on the rage and be silent? I tried going to their bosses; their bosses’ response was to try to get me fired from my own job.
How do my readers suggest that I handle such an improbably unethical hosting company?
November 13th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Sadly, you probably aren’t allowed to make any fo the names / company public due to your shared clientelle. As long as your boss knows you arent spouting off bad info, and he now knows how this company reacts and does business, you should start migrating your future customers to proven hosts, or at least hosts that dont share a mutual interest in your business.
November 13th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
We don’t control where our users host, unfortunately.
November 17th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Generally I think the best approach is, if your customers come to you with a problem, then it’s your fault (whether or not it actually is).
So sometimes the best course of action can be the hardest, admitting to being at fault when you know you aren’t. From the customer’s point of view, it doesn’t really matter if it’s actually the other guy’s fault, or if the other guy is full of crap. All that matters to them is how *you’re* going to help them, since they came to you with the problem.
Or rather, you don’t have to admit to being at fault, but apologize as if you are, and offer to help them fix whatever is broken.
I think customers generally know when it’s their fault, or the other guy’s fault, or whoever’s fault.. but that’s not what matters to them. They want to hear how it’s going to get better, not why it’s bad.
November 17th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
That’s good advice, and advice I’ll try to honor, but in context, the only way to actually fix things is for the hosting provider in question to get off their duffs and un-break their server.
The problem isn’t so much the fact that they’re clueless and borderline libellous in their explanations of other people as the root of their failure; the problem is that without root, I can’t fix the problem, and when they blame it on us and leave us with no mechanism to deal with the problem at hand…
Y’know?
November 19th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
I know all about being clueless and breaking servers. If there’s one thing I’ve learned being a sanitation engineer is that you always have to deal with other peoples crap, how you deal with it is what’s important, at least while you are in range of sight.