Digital Meanderings
Meanderings of a coder

I’ve been a member of the Ars Technica community for a long time. It is a very close and helpful community. It is filled with intelligent and caring people. There are quite a few members with the entrepreneurial spirit and often times other members are happy to throw some business to these people. Often times this works out very well for everyone involved but every once and a while a business comes along that is run by people with really no experience. Such is the case of Aetheri now Leafy Host, a web hosting company started by two members of Ars.

Here a link to the original thread if you care to look. In this post I plan on dissecting it.

In the beginning it seemed like a great service. It was run well and the services were provided at a great price. But two months everything changed. Two months ago they encountered a complete hard drive failure and they lost a lot of data. Not too bad though, every hosting company has backups right?

Although they advertised multiple backups it become very obvious that they were a false promise. There were no backups. The drive needed to be professionally recovered. Instead of sending it out immediately this company decided to try to fix it themselves. They made an image of the drive, or so their customers hope, and began to use the FSCK tool. Apparently this has helped a little but not all the data has been recovered.

The worst part of this fiasco is all of the un-kept and vague promises that were made by the people at Leafy Host. They continuously would say that the drive would be sent “soon.” They promised again and again to send the drive “tomorrow.” As of 12/5 they promised that they would send the drive out on 12/6.

They also would lose contact. In one instance they were out of contact with their customers for a week. Strangely, after an anonymous post was made to one of their girlfriend’s blogs and after a ban was threatened, they made contact again. Before that people called cell phones and left voice mails, sent e-mails and create trouble ticket. Their lack was contact was blamed on a dead cell phone battery, an expired help desk license and a broken email server.

Anyone else think that the operators of Leafy Host have been spewing bull?

Remember folks the kindness of community, and your customers, only goes so far. If you run a business keep the following in mind:

• Communication is extremely important. If a customer sends you an email or leaves you a voice mail - get back to them immediately even it is just to let them know that you received their message.
• Set the expectation. If your customer asks when something is going to be fixed give them an honest answer. If you don’t know or aren’t sure tell the customer so. But do let them know that you will provide them with a better estimate. If you missed the expectation help your customer understand why it happened and how you plan to rectify the matter.
• If you are going to be unreachable, or you are unreachable because server/application issues find a way to get the word out to your customers. I realize this belongs with communication, but I feel this point is very important.
• Do not lie to your customers. When a customer is paying money for a service there is a certain amount of trust implicitly placed on both parties. The customer trusts that the business will care for the their needs and will work hard to fix any problems that arise. The business trusts that the customer will pay them.
• Save your money. Although I could be wrong, I feel the reason why Leafy Host waited so long to send the drive for recovery was because they didn’t have the money to pay for the service. Running a business takes capital and the owners need to eat. This is why a business needs a war chest or a rainy day fund. Businesses need money to help them through the lean times and when the unexpected arises.

I do hope Leafy Host survives and that the operators have learned their lesson. Too bad a teacher from the School of Hard Knocks had to do it but if they learned their lesson then not all is lost.

If you have any comments, suggestions for other business owners or something to add feel free to leave a comment.

2006-12-17 - Editor’s Note: It has come to my attention that I should probably include the aliases that are used by the company in this article. Here they are: Leafy Host, LeafyHost, and Aetheri. If you have anymore, please feel free to post them as a comment.

I’m slowly becoming an Apple Fan Boy (yea I know, I’m disgusted by it too) but their hardware is just so sexy. If they someday come out with a video game system I’d be very tempted to get it - as long as they also have the games to support it.

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