[Sysadmin] Re: The Planet Support Ticket Created:775680PLNT:30-Day Notification of Pricing Increase (Celeron)

[David Kaufman]

William Anderson wrote:
>
> Stephane Deschamps wrote:
>
>> David Kaufman <david at gigawatt.com> wrote:
>>> Doesn't *that* suck...!
>>
>> Now isn't that a 15% increase? Wow. I'll go into the hosting
>> business, sounds nice.
>
> $89 for what we're getting is still pretty fscking good.

Yes, it's definitely still a good deal.  They are charging $99/month for 
similar servers now.  The notice was sent to all their customers paying 
*less* than $79 (i.e. all of us who took advantage of one of the 
higher-setup/lower-monthly specials of theirs.

We're actually only paying $59/month, now (after forking over a $300 
setup fee...), so now we'll be bumped only to $69 per month.

What makes me mad is the "We're raising the rates -- screw you" attitude 
of the email notice, and the extremely short <30 days notice.

What if you'd had 20 clients on that special with complicated sites that 
take time to move?  What if you had 200?  In the hosting business, 
giving customers a mere 30 days to pay up or move their sites is a good 
way to lose customers forever!  My web hosting provider (pair.com) has 
never raised rates on me ...in 8 *years*!  And they periodically 
increase storage, bandwidth, mail and database allowances to stay ahead 
of the competition!

This is a truly lousy way to treat customers, even bottom-feeding cheap 
customers like us :-)  The decision to do this, and to it like this, 
just seems short-sighted to me, and makes me distrust the company.  And 
after reading this thread on their own customer forums 
http://forums.servermatrix.com/viewtopic.php?t=15555 from other unhappy 
campers, I'm concerned that this could be just a hint of more bad things 
to come.

I just did the math, and we've been there 12 months, so they basically 
just took back all of our discounted savings and then some.  The $300 
setup fee we paid bought us a low $59 monthly rate (instead of the 
then-regular $79 w/free setup).  My reasoning for choosing it was that 
we planned to be here a long time, and the break-even point for that to 
be a good deal would have been 15 months later (three months from now). 
$20/month savings * 15 months = $300.

After that break-even point we'd have been *saving* $20 month off the 
"regular rate".  But if we were to leave now, we would have effectively 
paid more than the $79 "retail" price -- we'd have $85 per month.  Since 
they're only raising the rate only $10, the difference is that now our 
break-even point moves back 3 more months, from November to next 
February.  Assuming they don't raise our rates *again*, it's still a 
*decent* deal, though just not as good as it was...

So after February we'll (hopefully) still be enjoying a pretty darned 
low $69 monthly rate, which seems even lower in light of the fact that 
the "regular" price is now $99, not $79 anymore.  But it still stinks 
that they'd do this, and particularly that they'd do it in this 
heavy-handed way.

I think we should carefully plan a fail-over scenario.  If they raise 
rates on us again in the next 12 months, as seems likely, I'd want to 
run and as their staff mentioned (right before they locked the that 
thread on their forum), the only *had* to give us *13* days notice, per 
their terms of service...

-dave