20 Jun
2018
20 Jun
'18
8:41 a.m.
On 19/06/2018 20:22, Andy Smith wrote:
<snip>
So the question becomes, what methods of contact must you supply
before being able to have a VPS provisioned? At the moment it's just
an email address and a postal address.
Requiring a phone number seems quite radical, although it would solve
a lot of the problems that people have.
I think it is perhaps best that the phone number be optional (as it
is now), but if you don't supply one then you accept that in
emergencies your service may be impacted because we couldn't contact
you.
One thing that could be changed is that the order form does not even
collect a phone number. So you have to sign up, and then go to the
address book and add one. The order form could optionally collect a
phone number and explain why it does so, to make this more obvious.
Maybe label the phone number box on the sign-up form as "Emergency
contact phone number" and create a duplicated second contact in the
account address book (but with the phone number included) as "Emergency
Contact" and assign it appropriately?
While I was leaning towards allowing up to an extra month's cost in
overage fees before cut-off and you don't sound like you have had
trouble with people not paying them, having read the rest of the thread
I'm now leaning towards a default of no overage and cutting off when the
data allowance is used, but with the option to set a fixed
amount/percentage (with the amount calculated and displayed) in the
user's account. That way, anyone who never logs into their Bitfolk
account to change settings isn't going to get an unexpected bill, but
anyone with higher requirements can set them. I suspect that businesses
who don't want to be cut off still probably wouldn't want their bill to
run into the highest possible overage cost for a month, so they could
just set a very high overage amount/percent.
Personally I'll probably then set mine to around an extra month's worth,
although since I no longer host for clients just friends and family it's
a lot less important to me than it would have been in the past. I've
never (that I recall) got anywhere near the allowance, at least at it's
current value, so it's unlikely that I'd need to use it though.
Gavin