Hi Folks,
Some events happened today which were rather frustrating and I suppose it is a reflection on human nature to some degree, I thought I would share this with the general user base here as an insight in to the day in the life of a host.
As some of you may be aware I started up a project to give people access to cheap resources with the €3.00 p/year VPS services at lowendspirit.com this is ran at a loss and as a personal project, the revenue from this service does not now and never will cover the expenses and I try to make that clear when ever it is posted as an offer so people understand what they are getting.
I opened up a bit more stock today and specifically requested when I posted the offer here that people do not post the direct sign up link anywhere, I want them to buy it via the site so they fully understand what it is they are getting, sadly someone decided to ignore that and posted the link on http://www.hostloc.com which seems to be some sort of hosting forum for China with an affiliate link.
I requested that they take down the direct link and decided to ignore the fact they activated an affiliate link which skims even more revenue off the bottom line for this sponsored project then on further investigation I find that this person as signed up for a number of them using different accounts to try and get the price even lower I assume by getting 15% back per affiliate sign up.
So once I tied together all the accounts by IP, phone number etc I suspended the VPS's asking for communication and to validate who they actually are, within literally 10 minutes I get 2 notices of paypal disputes and 6 minutes after that 2 charge back notifications (for €3) so as a result of this I will no doubt be banged for a further $50 - $100 in charge back fee's the charge backs came through as I was closing the many accounts that were obviously fakes and with the full intention of just giving a refund as the disputes showed it was pointless trying to work with this person.
So in short a not for profit service was exploited to try and pay even less for it, followed by 2 charge backs within minutes because I tried to get things in order which will put the costs up even more.
Perhaps it is just because I am getting old that I rant more these days but that just seems like a scum of the earth move to me, this is not the first incident I have had like this and I am sure it will not be the last but it seems like people actually genuinely want to hurt hosts these days and get a real kick out of it without any consideration for anyone else and at the same time could not be less interested in paying attention to any rules or regulation.
The upshot is that the next location is now not going ahead this week, the person in question I am 99.9% sure is a member of this forum too which makes it even harder to swallow, seems like I need to come up with a new system for allowing orders for this service to safe guard myself, I was considering just not allowing any orders from China at all but that really does not seem fair on people or perhaps only allowing orders for this product for members that PM me here and have been a member for more than 3 months with 20+ posts.
Anyway I seem to have created a wall of text so I will finish typing in a second, the message is please don't consider hosts to be targets to exploit, most of us are in this business with the right attitude you don't stand outside local shops shouting about how bad they are when something does not go your way to damage them, a little respect goes a long way.
/me runs off to play the worlds smallest violin.