Re: [bitfolk] How much should BitFolk allow you to owe us before we suspend your service?

Hi Nicholas, Thanks for your input. On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 05:01:18PM +0000, Nicholas Hollands wrote: The problem customers don't alter default settings or respond to emails so there is a default that must be set, by BitFolk. Once there is some acknowledgement that limits have been exceeded it's not really an issue as the customer can decide what they want to happen. But yes there would be no problem in later making this process simpler by allowing people to indicate ahead of time what should happen. But there's going to have to always be a default. So just to be clear, this whole thing is a very rare issue. Although as I say there are a few customers that go into overage every month, they pay it each time and that's fine. A large, unexpected overage bill that a customer is unhappy about is really rare. One of the size I am talking about here has happened once in over 10 years. The main factor in this incident is a lack of communication. If communication had been established while the outstanding amount was relatively small then this wouldn't have turned into a problem. Your proposal is quite complicated and is targeting a problem that I don't think we have. If customers are willing to accept that if they go into overage, and DON'T respond to attempts to contact them about that, then they will have their service temporarily impacted in the interests of not costing them a lot of money, then this is a very simple way to solve the problem. Managing repeated overage isn't a problem that I have at the moment so I don't want to get into that at this stage. In the case at hand the customer had supplied no contact details except email. In actual fact the only reason why they became aware of the matter was that we realised one of us coincidentally knew them on a social media platform, and they were poked there. Unfortunately by that time it was already at the end of the billing period. You can already supply alternate/additional email addresses and phone numbers at the Panel: <https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/contacts/#toc-address-book> Had any alternate contact methods been available, I would have used them at the point where I raised the support ticket. 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. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting