On 19/6/2018 20:07, Andy Smith wrote: I prefer a multiplier of monthly service charge. Maybe go from +1x to +6x, customer decides, default +1x. --GM

Can we start at 0x rather than 1x Sent from my iPhone

Hi GM, Thanks for your input. On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 08:59:04PM +0300, G. Miliotis wrote: So just to state some specific numbers, for a base £8.99/mo VPS, this would currently allow for 150GB of excess data transfer, on top of the included 1,000GB. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 07:14:23PM +0100, Tim Dickson wrote: One observation: some of us run our email on the VPS, so warnings *before* the cut-off would be vital here, because a warning sent after the VPS lots network wouldn't arrive... Hugo. -- Hugo Mills | Great oxymorons of the world, no. 4: hugo@... carfax.org.uk | Future Perfect http://carfax.org.uk/ | PGP: E2AB1DE4 |

Hi Paul, Thanks for your input. On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 05:28:02PM +0100, Paul Tansom wrote: Yes this is the case, but it is hard to be get specific. My sense is that there are more personal hosting customers than business customers, but the businesses on average spend more. I also suspect that there are quite a few people running VPSes for a business yet they have signed up using only personal details. One thing that I initially found quite shocking — but after ~11 years I have come to terms with — is that mostly customers ignore me unless they are forced to respond. So they won't provide details of their business, and they won't respond to questions about whether the contract is with them personally or with an incorporated entity. I can spend a lot of time trying to get answers out of people, or I can accept that as long as they pay the bills and I manage the liability¹, I should just let it go. So the short answer is I can't easily quantify what is personal and what is business other than "some personal are actually business". I do of course know what they tell me, so yes it would be possible to have different defaults for (those that declare they are an incorporated entity) vs. (those ordering in their own name i.e. assumed personal hosting customers), with the possibility for the customer to choose different options. It's an interesting suggestion, but what I fear about it is the complexity for the customer. For the personal hoster it seems okay because the default state is restrictive, but the default state for the business is unlimited. So that has to be explained somewhere that I know the customer will see it. And when it comes time to a billing dispute they can't be able to say that it wasn't obvious enough. On the other hand, it does tend to be easier to get businesses to pay bills, indeed. I haven't gone into all the optional settings which are possible because it's a nearly infinite set, and I feel like I first need to set the defaults for those who make no conscious choice. The only thing that I've mentioned that I am really averse to is throttling (traffic shaping). The bills for overage are always calculated every 30 days because of being billed in arrears and being a form of credit, so you are proposing a limit of £6+VAT before some intervention happens, yes? If the customer has already been in touch to say they are aware of the overage and will pay the bill then there is no intervention. If the customer asks for their network to be turned off then we can do that. It's only where there is no response by the customer that the intervention would be to turn off their network until they do respond and say what they want to happen. I mentioned them only to show that although overage is generally rare, there are a minority of customers who regularly use it. The typical customer struggles to transfer more than a couple of GB per month and so I can imagine that it is hard to put yourselves into the mindset of someone who regularly intentionally moves terabytes. It would be easier (although less lucrative) for me if they did not go into overage, but they have resisted reasonable efforts to convince them to commit to a higher amount, so I just keep taking their money. Since there is going to have to be a way to say that "yes, I am okay with potentially higher overage bills than £x", I can certainly have another go at telling them that they will need to enable that (or commit to more). A lot of people are surprised that a base spec VPS can actually push about 80Mbp/sec. Which is about 25 terabytes per 30 days. In each direction. I have learned that most customers crave simplicity… :) Cheers, Andy ¹ Basically in terms of debt recovery, for my case if it's a UK-based incorporated entity then my chances are quite good because of the statutory law regarding late payment of commercial debts. In any other case it is prudent for me to be very averse to offering credit of any kind. -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

Hi Ian, On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 08:07:48PM +0100, Ian wrote: Yep, I'm in full agreement that this incident represents a failure of credit control on BitFolk's part and that is what I can and will fix. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

Just to add my twopenn'orth. I would be more than happy to be cut off as soon as data usage hit the limit. That would certainly signal something desperately wrong going on. As I quite frequently spend a week or two at a time far from phone signals or any reliable internet connection, an early warning system would be difficult. But then mine is a purely personal account I also think that maybe the sign up form should have alternative contact details as a requirement. But surely, there is a limit to what you can be expected to do to inform a customer that their account is going haywire On Wed, 20 Jun 2018 at 07:00, G. Miliotis <corfiot(a)elementality.org> wrote: -- Keith Williams คืนใดมืดที่สุด จะเห็นดาวชัดที่สุด Wondrous Thai http://www.wondrousthai.com FCLT magazine http://issuu.com/fcltmagazine/docs/fclt_september_2014_issue_1 Farang Can Learn Thai www.farangcanlearnthai.com Keith's Place www.keiths-place.co.uk Tailor Made English www.tmenglish.org

Must admit I do like Stuart's idea of zero and massive throttling when I hit the limit - I'd want a way in for management purposes though. That way the "default" behaviour would be no surprise bills. If someone is happy that occasionally they'll get a big bill, they need to "opt in", again it removes any grounds for complaints - they've got what they asked for. However that may still leave Bitfolk out of pocket - perhaps if they opt for a 200% ceiling, they pay a deposit big enough to cover it? Anyway, I'm just a "personal" user, hopefully won't affect me, so over to others who it might affect. Cheers Nigel ________________________________ From: users &lt;users-bounces+nigel=hardwick.demon.co.uk(a)lists.bitfolk.com&gt; on behalf of Nicholas Hollands &lt;moogthedog(a)yahoo.co.uk&gt; Sent: 19 June 2018 18:01:18 To: users(a)lists.bitfolk.com; Andy Smith Subject: Re: [bitfolk] How much should BitFolk allow you to owe us before we suspend your service? Extremely ex-customer here, who never unsubbed from the list. I used to be a 'personal' customer, running a small server for me and a few friends to SSH tunnel out of the office firewall, and do a bit of file storage for pictures on fora and the like. To unexpectedly receive a bill like that (and you never know if something's going to go viral) would have been the end of me. From that perspective, I'd say it's certainly in both yours and the customers' interests to have some sort of upper limit - whether in money or data. Hit that limit, shutters come down until the balance is paid. The size of the limit would probably be best declared by the customer, and agreed by you, you knowing what sort of sudden expense BitFolk can accept versus potential revenue. For repeat offenders, the electricity board direct debit solution comes to mind. If a customer (say) goes into overage three months running, start requesting additional funds up front, possibly as a function of an overage average over a period. "You've owed us £100 extra each month for the last three - so we want £75 advance (deposit?) for the expected overage for *next* month, to be subtracted off your next bill. You get a bit of peace of mind, and the customer gets the service they need, or a spot of account credit if they don't use it. Also, (and this may be moot) alternate lines of communication - You seem to be (and IIRC correctly always were) fairly hands-on. If something does unexpectedly drop into freefall like that, a phone or skype call (or other 'instant' comms method) may be the quickest way to get someone's attention and resolve the situation. Just thoughts. I'll go back to lurking. N. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana On Tuesday, 19 June 2018, 16:59:30 GMT+1, Andy Smith &lt;andy(a)bitfolk.com&gt; wrote: Hello, Recently we had a rather unfortunate situation where a customer ran up a very large (4 figure) unexpected overage bill. The current systems of BitFolk behaved how they are currently meant to, in that the customer received an email warning and then very quickly an email notification that limits had been passed and further data transfer would incur a charge. In addition to the automated process, on the day where the limits were exceeded I also opened a support ticket with the customer to warn them that all further data transfer would incur a charge. Sadly the customer did not read any of the emails, so the level of use continued for the remainder of the 30 day period, then at the end a huge bill was presented. I am not looking to discuss the way in which the customer here was in the wrong. The outcome is undesirable to BitFolk because it is always going to be difficult to get an unexpected overage bill paid when it's approximately 300 times the size of the regular monthly charge. Any customer presented with such a bill is likely to be extremely upset, and we don't want upset customers. So, how can we improve the process? The problem with the existing procedure here is that after the notification of exceeding limits has been sent, there is no follow-up until the end of the measuring period. In a case such as this where usage is very high, the data transfer quota can be exhausted quickly and then you've got several weeks where it can continue at the same rate, building up a huge overage bill. In my view what should have happened is that once some level of outstanding bill was reached without any response by the customer to say that this was expected and should continue, BitFolk should have turned off their network to limit further expense. At least until they respond to discuss what they want to do about it. Assuming you agree with that, it becomes a question of what that limit should actually be. I brought this matter up a long time ago when it was a hypothetical situation and the majority of respondents at the time were very against the idea of service being interrupted without an instruction from them to do so. For the following 10 years we've done things that way and not interrupted anyone's service purely for transferring more data than their plan covers, but now that the potential for running up very large bills has been demonstrated, it is a risk to BitFolk and is something we have to revisit. So when considering this issue, please try to consider it not as hypothetical, but as if it were yourself running up a bill. Please also bear in mind that because we are talking about what should happen in the case where there is no communication, whatever we decide has to be the default for all customers. To deviate from the default will require a setting being changed in the Panel or a support ticket ahead of time. So, at what level of overage would you consider it desirable for BitFolk to temporarily suspend your network access rather than cost you more money? Should the amount actually be zero, i.e. as soon as you go over the limit (despite warnings etc) your network is suspended until you acknowledge that you will pay your overage bill? It may be possible to use traffic shaping to limit the liability. This is not really an area I want to get into because: - It would only be one-way: data you send out. We can't necessarily control data that is sent *to* you, especially if it is not TCP. - By interfering with your data flow in my view it makes us *more* liable for your behaviour. A customer could always argue that they aren't paying their bill because we should have done a *better* job of shaping their traffic to prevent/reduce the bill. Fully specifying how the shaping would work might help, but people who are facing a bill they don't want to pay can always find fault with that, and those aren't conversations I particularly want to deal with. Therefore, the only form of traffic shaping that I really want to consider is the most extreme kind: no traffic is allowed at all! Something must be put in place to try to avoid this ever happening again, so I would appreciate your thoughts on how it should work. Again, rather than just saying it is the customer's fault (no one is arguing that it is not the customer's responsibility), please try to imagine yourself in the situation where your VPS is running up an overage bill and you haven't seen any of the emails or seen the Cacti graphs etc. It is a risk to BitFolk. What would you want done about it? Finally, I should mention that there are currently two customers who almost every month run up overage bills that are 10 to 20 times their monthly regular bill. They have done so for a long time; they have already been advised to commit to more in order to reduce their bills, but they keep paying the overage bills. So while overage is quite rare across the customer base, for a few customers it is the norm. Whatever is decided may involve me forcing those customers to change the way they do things. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting_______________________________________________ users mailing list users@lists.bitfolk.com<mailto:users@lists.bitfolk.com> https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users

On Tue, 19 Jun 2018 19:22:44 +0000 Andy Smith &lt;andy(a)bitfolk.com&gt; wrote: <snip> Most recent registrations I've done recently have required a telephone number, so not so radical IMHO <snip> -- John Lewis Debian & the GeneWeb genealogical data server

Actually, I partially disagree with Ian’s assertion; there is also a strong element of security here. While I use my VPSs for business, the network usage is relatively low. If any of my VPSs ever approach my contracted limits, then something has gone very seriously wrong, and it is probably an indication that my server has been compromised. In that event, I would want it cut off from everything except the Xen console. I would prefer to be able set my own soft- and hard thresholds via the panel, which in my case would be far below the contracted values. Also, in response to your frustration regarding personal vs. business customers, it is not always black and white. I am a self-employed, sole-trader; so to your question, am I a business or a personal customer, the answer is both. Chris — Chris Smith &lt;space.dandy(a)icloud.com&gt;

Hi Andy, I understand your point, but I see user-definable thresholds as killing two birds with one stone. For the soft threshold, I don’t think anything more is required than the email warning which you already have implemented. So, warn when exceeding the soft limit, cut off when exceeding the hard limit. Regards, Chris -- Chris Smith &lt;space.dandy(a)icloud.com&gt;

Paul Lewis &lt;paul(a)pjlewis.org&gt; said, in message C231E2A2-6B8C-4684-9AE2-5A88B1533347(a)pjlewis.org: This would work for me. My VPS hosts a couple of web sites (one paying a nominal fee for maintenance and hosting), mail for a local company (as a favour for friends) and my personal domains. So getting cut off *would* inconvenience some people who rely on me. But, on the flip side, even 400GBytes of overage charge would swamp the yearly income I get from them. Of course, this option still doesn't protect Bitfolk from the case where someone has explicitly enabled overage fees, but it'll save you chasing people who've been unlucky and couldn't immediately pay the bill even if they wanted to. I do think that even overage charges should have a cut off too (or stupendously aggressive throttling). It's not as though people can't buy extra up-front if they know something big is coming down the line. I'd limit it to e.g. 10 x their monthly agreed quota. Cheers, Alun.