BS”D
Last night, my hosting company suspended my account and informed me one of my sites was “too hot to handle” and had to be moved to a separate server with more resources that the company did not have available. No big deal; I was planning to separate that one from the rest which are just development sites.
So, I called my friend who has a large PayPal balance and asked if he wanted to trade cash for part of it so I could use PP to pay for the new hosting. I had to call him because his E-mails were bouncing. Sure enough I found out he had also been thrown off his hosting because a hacker had abused his account and the poorly run local hosting firm would not assist him in getting rid of it but instead got rid of him. He is the director of a chessed and chinuch moisad for whom every penny counts in this lousy economy and he was looking for the lowest possible price for good service.
I told him I would let him know which option I was about to choose was best for him. I had planned to direct him to my original host as I still use them for my other sites and they are reliable and reasonable, but not great.
Then, I signed up for a special deal on a major host – which accepted me and then suspended me soon after, mysteriously returning my money. I was not thrilled with the speed of my site on the new host, and I hardly cared. I then checked out a smaller, specialized company I had dealt with before and had been pleased with – and found out they had an AMAZING deal which I took immediately as it was about an 80%! beginning of 2010 discount.
What’s more, once I had the deal, I was eligible for an EVEN BETTER deal, HALF the price I paid, which I could also pass on to a friend, and pass it on I did.
I later saw that the first company had sent me a request for ID after I had set up my new account. The request had landed in my junk box and I did not notice. Since I did not respond, they threw me off and refunded my money as my account had come from Ukraine where there is a lot of fraud. Had I noticed it and responded as I would have normally (I am always asked to verify new hosting and related accounts), I would have stayed with the first company and ended up paying 8 times as much as I do now for service that is nowhere near as good. My friend would not have gotten his offer which is almost 90% off regular price! What’s more, had I waited ten more minutes, I would not have gotten my deal either as it was about to expire.