Firstly, it wasn't all bad, I'd been a customer for 5 years and at the time they were offering a very competitive product. I had only one hardware problem at the time and it was dealt with sufficiently.
The price did keep creeping up, but I was somewhat consoled that the specs on my package were creeping up too, or so I thought.
Then checking my credit card statement one day, I noticed a charge that was about 18x my usual charge.
It seemed that I had gone over my usage limit. I cannot to this day see how that happened, but support could offer me no logs to add veracity to their claims. Regardless of whether or not I had actually used that much bandwidth, it was less than the current advertised limit for the plan I was a subscriber to. However because I hadn't asked to "switch" to the same plan, with the same name and same price as I was paying I was stuck my my original bandwidth limit. After a plea to the CEO (or whoever reads the CEO's mail), I was given a credit. Since I wasn't in the mood for more of a fight, I accepted that. My credit has now just expired and here I am writing this blog entry.
I was irate at the time, but 16 months has mellowed me somewhat.
There's a number of things that SP could do better.
- Automatically move customers to the new plans, had they done this, they would still have my custom.
- Provide a sanctioned usage meter. Support suggest installing your own, but of course they will always use their own.
- Make your customers aware that you use 95th percentile billing. I suspect this is what tripped me up.
- Inform your customers about outages on a service status page. When my server and your infrastructure is down, I like to know what is going on.
- Make your cancellation process simpler. I don't want to have to send a fax or an email to cancel. Complex cancellation processes actually put customers off.
The best thing about this whole experience is that I discovered linode.com of whom I am a very happy customer.
