For Your Customers` Sake, Be an Ethical Web Host
For Your Customers` Sake, Be an Ethical Web Host
What does it mean to be an ethical web host? And why is this an area in which so many web hosts falter? Keep reading to find out why being an ethical web host makes good business sense.Many colleges and universities offer classes on business ethics as part of their degree programs. Medical schools teach ethics as well, as a topic that has become even more important now with the advances in that field. You don’t hear as much about web hosting ethics, but that does not mean it is less important.
After all, web hosting is a business like any other. And while you may not be talking about actual lives riding on your decisions, as doctors do, you are dealing with the lives of your customers’ businesses — and any problems in that area can still be pretty devastating. If you drop the ball here, you lose customers; and it is certainly possible to drop the ball so badly that you cause your customers to go bankrupt, something no reputable host wants to do!
There are some important points to keep in mind as to how you conduct your business, if you want to be known as an ethical web host. Fortunately, many of them involve common sense, as applied to the special situation of being a web host. Not cheating your customers or lying to them about what you can do or are doing for them is pretty basic (though there have been cases of web hosts that failed to manage even that much).
If you think about it from your customer’s perspective, it should be pretty clear what they want, and what you need to do to give them what they want. They are first and foremost concerned with their own businesses, and anything that has a negative impact on that business is to be avoided. Therefore, when they evaluate a web host, the following issues will crop up: performance, customer service, and security/privacy/trust. All three of these points are interconnected, and are made up of several sub-issues. I’ll cover each of them in turn.
For Your Customers` Sake, Be an Ethical Web Host – Deliver the Performance They Need
The first point to consider under performance is uptime. What good is a website if it is not up and running? The lack up uptime is a big reason for businesses to switch web hosts. By this we mean no more than an hour, total, of downtime for a site in a one-month period — and the better you can do with this, the happier your customers will be. To quote one writer who switched web hosts six times in a one-year period, “Almost anything can be forgiven as long as sites are up and running, as close to 100 percent of the time as possible.”
Customers get antsy when their website is down because it can set off a nasty domino effect. If the site is part of a webring (and many sites still are), it might get automatically removed from the ring if it is down for too long. Sites will also get dropped from search engines if they are down for too long. And visitors who come to a site and see that it is down too often will revise their bookmarks accordingly.
The second point to consider under performance is your own servers. Yes, it is understandable that the more websites you can put on one server, the more profit you will make. However, the sites that are on your servers not only need to stay up; they need to perform well. If your clients’ customers have problems accessing the website, whether the site is down or merely slow, you will hear about it.
Along these lines, if your servers are filling up, it makes good business sense to replace them or add more before they are completely full. After all, if you have so many customers that your servers are filling up, it means that your business is booming. If your business is booming, you can certainly afford new equipment!
Another server-related point concerns changes and upgrades you may want to make. You may think the best way to help your customers is to put these changes in place as quickly as possible. While you may be excited about getting these new capabilities up and running, your customers are more concerned about keeping their sites up and running. Therefore, do not test your changes and upgrades on production servers. You need to know all of the possible side effects of any upgrade from having actually tested them out — that way, you can warn and inform your customers in advance. Simply telling your customers that the system is running slowly because you are in the process of making upgrades is not good enough, and customers deserve better.
For Your Customers` Sake, Be an Ethical Web Host – Keeping Customers Informed is Key
This brings us to the second important point that an ethical web host keeps in mind: customer service, or specifically, communication with your customers. Believe it or not, customers do understand that things happen sometimes; servers crash, or they need maintenance. Your customers will be a lot more understanding, however, if you let them know about emergencies as soon as they happen, or about maintenance enough in advance that they can take the appropriate actions if and when it has an impact on them. Do not leave them hanging, wasting precious time trying to figure out what is going on.
Especially when it is something that directly affects a customer’s website, it is important to let them know. For example, if one of your customers is using a script that is eating up resources, and you need to disable the script, the least you should do is send them an email at the same time as you disable the script, explaining why you are doing this. The two of you working together might even be able to come up with something that accomplishes the same thing as the script did, that eats up far fewer resources.
One web host even makes this a point in their own code of ethics: “I will communicate with management, users and colleagues about computer matters of mutual interest. I will strive to listen and understand the needs of all parties.”
One way that web hosts and their customers communicate with each other is via trouble tickets. Many hosts have their system set up to automatically acknowledge trouble tickets. That’s a start, but it’s only a start. People expect automated replies; they know that the problem is not truly being taken care of until a human being sees it and gets to work on it. Train your support personnel to send replies to trouble tickets as they handle them, letting your customers know that the ticket has been handled. And don’t suddenly close the ticket without informing the customer; the ticket isn’t fully taken care of until the customer is satisfied.
Another point relating to trouble tickets should be obvious, but has tripped up web hosts before. It is important to actually read the trouble ticket and understand what the customer’s problem, question, request, or complaint is. Not reading the trouble ticket, or not understanding it fully, can lead to all sorts of problems. One web host customer mentioned sending in a ticket in which he requested something called “bigmailbox” for a certain specific domain. The support person changed the record for an entirely different domain, which caused the customer’s site “to lose email capacity for two days until they eventually figured out what they messed up.”
For Your Customers` Sake, Be an Ethical Web Host – Security, Privacy, and Trust
These three issues are interrelated, and shift in meaning. As a starting point, they mean that you do what you say you’re going to do. Deliver on your promises; if it is avoidable, don’t let timetables slip. Have an easy-to-understand Terms of Service; yes, your customers will read it, and they will certainly expect you to stick by it. In fact, they’ll depend on it. In particular, if you have a signed contract with a customer in which you have made certain promises about how their data will be handled, stick to it.
Recently I read about one case in which a web host had a contract with several of its customers concerning back up tapes. According to the terms of the contract, the tapes were supposed to be rotated and taken out of the server room, off-site, so that, in case there was some kind of disaster at the web host’s site, the customer’s data would be safe. In fact, a consultant discovered that the web host regularly left the tapes in the server room, in the drives; the ones he saw were at least two days old. Worse, the tapes were located directly below a fire sprinkler. The web host’s customers in question were not-for-profits, and, if the web host suffered a bad enough disaster, could easily go out of business from this level of carelessness.
Privacy is another issue that concerns many customers. Some web host customers have databases containing private information from thousands of individuals; computer dating sites are one example of these, but there are others. Other customers have created custom scripts that they believe may be worth large sums of money, and worry about a web host snooping around and selling it to someone else. Customers need to know that their web host is not going to take advantage of their access to their customers’ websites and information.
One thread on a web hosting forum raised these issues. While a number of the replies bemoaned the uncertainty of web hosts playing by ethical rules, one person raised the specter of the law: “Legally speaking, your web host should not pry into the data of your sites unless there is a court order or something to that nature. Your script belongs to you and your data belongs to you too.”
In short, treat your customers as you would wish to be treated yourself. Even in the world of web hosting, the Golden Rule holds true.
Article Source :
For Your Customers` Sake, Be an Ethical Web Host