A Brit cloud biz and an angry customer wanting a refund: A Love Story

Take a look at their Twitter Account today

A lovely GIF of Darth Vader with the caption "Haters Gonna Hate". Clearly the jackass in charge of Twitter is the same Jackass responding to customer complaints. Classy... real classy.

But why get into that position?

I really don't understand why businesses put important functions and data into the cloud. If it matters to the business, surely you want to be in control of it. A few quid saved at the cost of major business risk isn't such a great bargain.

Wow!

Sounds like he got through to the pet monster of Monster Cloud!

Attitude? Fuck them to death

The second a company thinks they can fuck me over and then tell me I have a bad attitude is the second they are dropped and they can sue me for any remainder.

I have literally almost come to blow with employees who thought I was inconveniencing them. In a car! I've gotten some fired. Do not fuck with me as customer.

Never using these scum ever

Another cloud provider I'll be avoiding like the goddamned plague.

Must remember to mention to every single person during my conference speech next week about the URl here so they too can tell this company to crash n burn.

Reseller?

I wonder if selling unlimited wifi to my neighbours on the back of my domestic connection would make me a reseller?

Well, only if, once the isp found out, they legitimised my business by charging me accordingly, and my neighbours agreed to the tenfold increase in price.

Only thinking.

About a year ago, I purchased a piece of hardware that came with little documentation. After a bit of poking around and reaching a dead end, I contacted their technical support and was only given a link to their document download page. To download any manuals or guides, you had to register an account with them (username, password, etc), which I did, albeit with an increasing level of irritation. The manuals turned out to provoke more questions than they answered, prompting another email to technical support, in which I added that I thought it was "ridiculous" to have to register an account and remember a new password just to access manuals and the like. I received a terse email stating that because of my "abusive" treatment of their support staff, they would no longer be providing technical support and, if I would like an RMA number in order to return the (relatively expensive) hardware, they would be happy to provide one. This was somewhat surprising, as "ridiculous" was the strongest word I had used so far and, curious, I checked their website to see if there was anyone else at the company with whom I could discuss the situation. As it turned out, their front line technical support was also their CEO, which complicated matters, but eventually we took them up on their offer to RMA the hardware.

This is why I only use the cloud for storing zeros

They compress well, and I keep all my ones elsewhere (in a pot in my shed) for backup purposes. I keep a 'map' on yet another medium (sheets of A4 paper in a safe) that indicates the actual order of the zeros and ones I've kept, so I can reproduce all my data even if the cloud is unavailable. The restore can take a while though.

Supplier assessment

<reads email exchange>

<thinks for a minute and remembers she's responsible for approving suppliers>

<picks up phone>

"Hi, is that procurement? Loz here. Can you take Monster Cloud off the ASL immediately, please? Cheers."

Their "engineers" might be better utilised correcting the pricing on their website.

LiveDrive?

Hmm! I got stung a few years back by a reseller company of LiveDrive.

The story as I remember it is, that the reseller found out that getting an unlimited cloud account himself, meant that he could offer an unlimited accounts to his own customers. He had his own branded software and it seemed to work quite well.

He confirmed what he was doing, and that he had an agreement with LiveDrive saying it was ok.

Of course, as you will have realised by now that things went pear shaped. LiveDrive seemingly changed its own rules and regulations, meaning that the enterprise wasn't allowed except at high cost.

Now I can make no judgement on this. The cost involved on my part was minimal and I was just dipping into it until it was seen to hold up, so I had no real problems when it went tits up.

What I think happened? One, or a variation of the following, an overkeen sales person at LiveDrive sold a product which the company was not aware of, took the commission and ran before they were found out; that the reseller set up an account through another reseller which was not allowed; that LiveDrive ran a promotion for 3 months after which the price of the service increased, in which if it was known about by the reseller does bring questions of honesty; that LiveDrive actually allowed the process to set up, either intentionally or not, then tried to get all the customers changed to them directly (by the way, I still have the emails from LiveDrive offering the service as a replacement, which I thought at the time was slightly unethical).

The result, whether rightly or wrongly, I will not use any product with LiveDrive involved, and there does seem to be quite a few around. Which does seem to offer another question.... The people who made money out of gold rushes, were the ones selling shovels. And if the shovels were made out of tin rather than iron, how many would be sold and at what price?

WE COME BARING CHEAP IT AND INFRASTRUCTURE

"Why pay so much for your IT/infrastructure - we will provide much quality for you for cheap. Step inside our wooden horse on wheels and we will explain. Come, come,..."

Turbo-switch your cloud system

All you need to do (and I actively encourage people to pass this info on) instead of having customers DIRECTLY upload to a cloud service, use a redirection webpage which handles your customer selecting the file they want to upload.

In this way, if you change cloud provider, it's the matter of one single change to a single setting to redirect the customers uploaded file to another cloud provider.

The 'redirection' webpage is incredibly simple to setup (and can download dozens of free HTML ready-to-go redirector HTML pages which are free).

Doing this means you ALSO have a backup...your current cloud system goes down? An Admin just has to edit the redirection page to point to the backup cloud provider!