Understand what your customers expect

http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2007/05/03/dreamhost-sucks-at-hosting/

While I'm reluctant to name competitors directly in my post, the URL leaves me little choice. I think it is worth a read. When I first saw the link I was ready to get up on my soapbox and proclaim why this particular company was wrong and why we need to do better as an industry to earn the trust of our customers. Although I do believe that, I think the issue is not as black-and-white as I originally imagined it would be.

Looking at the issue in some detail, I did feel a lot of sympathy for the web host being dragged through the mud here. Despite what some may think, web hosting of any sort is an exceedingly tough business. I found it somewhat amusing, concerning, and disheartening to see people making wild claims about "industry guidelines" dictating how many users should be on a server and bashing the specs of that particular machine. There are no guidelines that I know of, and every host runs their business a little differently. Customer expectations are through the roof for bandwidth, storage, uptime, and support execution. The business has changed quite a bit from when my business partner and I dipped our toes in the water in 1997. We pride ourselves on having great service and while our reputation supports that, we are far from perfect. We take every misstep as a learning experience and an opportunity to improve. I know that seeing an article like that on the front page of Digg would be gut-wrenching for me, and I'm sure the owners of Dreamhost don't feel great about it.

So from my outside perspective, where did things go wrong for this particular customer? Well, first let me sympathize with Dreamhost. Web hosting involves the interactions of many complex systems to make things. Not just networks, servers, power, cooling and other infrastructure but people, processes, and procedures. In even the best run businesses things go wrong all the time. All the time. Every day. If someone tells you differently they aren't being honest. A big part of what separates the best from the rest is how they deal with problems and adversity. Do their processes, procedures, and culture really focus on caring for the customer and making things right when problems happen?

Customer expectations are very high for all forms of hosting, including shared. Saying "you get what you pay for" as some people did on that blog is subjective and unfair. As web hosts we are obligated to give people everything they pay for, and if we really want to be good at our craft, a whole lot more. Overselling is a harsh reality of our business. Competition on price, bandwidth, and disk space is intense. Shared hosting is a wild free-for-all on server resources that has become more and more difficult in a time where fewer and fewer sites are brochure-ware.

But make no mistake, customers expect 100% uptime, all of the disk space and bandwidth included with their plans, and enough processing power to do whatever they need with their website. Whether we like it or not, whether it is fair or reasonable, that IS the expectation.

And it will continue to be the expectation until we tell customers otherwise, emphatically and clearly.

Think burying it in your terms of service or AUP is good enough? It isn't. No one reads that stuff, and while it may protect you legally, it certainly isn't making happy customers or helping your reputation. The problem is that we are so involved as an industry in selling lower prices and more disk space that no one wants to tell customers about the inherent flaws in shared hosting. I'm not indicting the platform necessarily, but it certainly isn't for everyone and has a lot of room for improvement. As customers' expectations continue to skyrocket, we clearly need to do a better job as an industry of educating our customers on the risks associated with the platform they select. Some hosts are trying to address these limitations with shared grid, load balanced, and clustered offerings but even those have had some fairly well publicized problems lately.

Now that I have gone in more than a few directions with this post, I'll get to what matters. How could this host have done better? It boils down to communication and ownership. Shutting down someone's website is not something to be taken lightly, regardless of the circumstances. To quote a wise man, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and they didn't necessarily do the wrong thing to protect their other customers on the server. But they did forget about the customer they shut down. Instead of taking an adversarial stance, they should have found a way to get him back online and worked together to find a solution. We keep isolation servers and VPS's readily available for just this purpose. Phone calls are always preferable to emails, especially under less than ideal circumstances. Sometimes doing the right thing is expensive and involved but the customer goodwill it builds makes it worthwhile. That sure seems preferable to all the negative press this incident generated.