As a buyer I have come to expect good vendors to design systems so mistakes (my team or yours) don't cost me sleep or you business.[3] i.e.
- they do soft-deletes before hard
- have robust access control systems and partitioning - so we don't have to give access to everyone in the org to object model with full r/w
- don't instantly nuke the account if a payment goes astray or delayed - try to reach out before to a point of contact before pulling the plug, payment systems can be messy for all sorts of reason, ask before assuming the worst.
- customer managers who can connect couple of times a year which usually benefits the vendor as upsells happens on good % of those connects.
- also small things like training, certification
- Deprecation of service is handled slowly(1 Yr would be expected) and in multiple phases with multiple modes of communication.
Not all companies can move fast to plan and execute a major change in location like this in 4 months, bare minimum you would have to consider
- End customers (your customer's customers) may need to be notified and may need to sign off
- Compliance and GDPR DPA changes - both end customers and internal ones
- DR, BCP concerns have to be planned for , not all GCP regions are equivalent.
- Documentation and certifications like SoC, ISO, PCI, HIPAA etc usually mean ton of paperwork to modify
- SRE/Devops may have to move other services along with telemetry on InfluxDB, may need network whitelisting from their customers, things typically break when moving, need to plan dry runs, rollbacks and so on.
A better way to handle service closure would be to shut down but not delete on the planned date[1] , and offer data export separately for few weeks/month after[2].
You can definitely do better than shutting down service and deleting data at the same time .
[1] I would do this for internal customers let alone external paying ones
[2] You could have even charged for this to offset any costs, most customers wouldn't have a problem paying if they really needed it.
[3] Not trying to imply InfluxDB is doing these things, or isn't a good vendor, these are some criteria I have come to measure new vendors by.
> don't instantly nuke the account if a payment goes astray or delayed
Hetzner deleted my server just one week after my payment due date. My credit card failed the payment for some reason. I didn’t notice this because I was ill with Covid. They sent me one email (or at least, I received only one email) as a warning. I only realized the server was gone when my services stopped working. I’m not sure if such a short warning time is common practice among hosting companies, or if it’s unique to Hetzner.
I've had the exact same experience with them. After 10 years using that server, one payment failed, about ten days and they nuked the machine. German efficiency I suppose.
I has an almost identical experience with https://virmach.com/. I will never recommend them.
After 5 years, they deleted everything 2 weeks after the first payment failure.
Sure it was the cheapest VPS. But still, you don't just delete your customers' data.
I was away from emails and the service during those two weeks. As far as I can tell it might have been some race condition in their payement processing system. They couldn't figure it out. They had no backup. They refused to reinstate the service anew to restore my own backup.
It doesn't look too far fetched from their point of view, they saw a payment failure and they may have assumed that you decided to stop paying and didn't bother to send a cancellation request.
It looks like you had your own backup, which is always a good idea, hopefully you were able to restore your data elsewhere.
I've been 3 weeks late for a Hetzner payment (also for medical reasons) more than once, and my servers are still running. They sent several emails, one was a reminder to pay and another was a warning about what date they would shut down service. So I guess their notice system isn't as straightforward as one week for everyone.
Perhaps it's because I pay for several bare metal servers, or because I have a business account with them. Perhaps it's because I pay their invoices by bank transfer manually instead of by credit card. Who knows! You have made me wary of changing to a credit card now, because those do fail from time to time!
What worries me more is Hetzner's reputation for suddenly dropping customers with no warning and no way to retrieve data from the servers. That's always on the back of my mind.
Some companies dont mark you as a debtor if you are under a certain threshold (say 10 dollars), because the cost of processing this unpaid amount is not worth their time.
Also it is smart to have the threshold set to at least 1 cent, because this way you dont ask someone to pay you is supposed to pay you a fraction of a cent due to some rounding error. There are those stories where a company sends you a registered mail, where they ask you to repay a fraction of a cent - what is impossible. Also the cost of the letter (snail mail) made it not worth it. Even if you get an email that is "free" you cant pay 0.0001 cent. I mean you can pay a whole one and then ask to get 0.999 back - the time required by the bookkeeper to process it, then pay it (probably with a fee) is not worth it.
- they do soft-deletes before hard
- have robust access control systems and partitioning - so we don't have to give access to everyone in the org to object model with full r/w
- don't instantly nuke the account if a payment goes astray or delayed - try to reach out before to a point of contact before pulling the plug, payment systems can be messy for all sorts of reason, ask before assuming the worst.
- customer managers who can connect couple of times a year which usually benefits the vendor as upsells happens on good % of those connects.
- also small things like training, certification
- Deprecation of service is handled slowly(1 Yr would be expected) and in multiple phases with multiple modes of communication.
Not all companies can move fast to plan and execute a major change in location like this in 4 months, bare minimum you would have to consider
A better way to handle service closure would be to shut down but not delete on the planned date[1] , and offer data export separately for few weeks/month after[2].You can definitely do better than shutting down service and deleting data at the same time .
[1] I would do this for internal customers let alone external paying ones
[2] You could have even charged for this to offset any costs, most customers wouldn't have a problem paying if they really needed it.
[3] Not trying to imply InfluxDB is doing these things, or isn't a good vendor, these are some criteria I have come to measure new vendors by.