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So ukhost4u have shut down the hosting we use for newmusicstrategies.
Some perspective on this, from the point of view of a hosting business.

We’ve been trying to move away but their left hand (the transfer out department) isn’t talking to the right (the billing department) and neither is talking to us. The result of this is that the all powerful billing department has decided something needs to be done. Some protectionist mechanism has kicked in, to stop us using the domain name and “costing them money”.

And that’s the dumbest thing ever.

Back in the bad old days when I worked out in industry proper, rather than with Dubber, we dealt a lot with hosting. We had preferred suppliers and everything. The hosting provider we used back in the day was small. Tiny. But there was enough slack built into the system to cope with this sort of problem. Advanced billing. “Positive renewal confirmations” (asking the customer if they could confirm they definitely want another year’s service). These all meant that the customer was being served.

ukhost4u would perhaps argue that they’re too big to to have this level of dialogue with their customers. Now I’m going to make some assumptions about our friends at ukhost4u:

1. They have a lot of customers

2. But not as many as godaddy

So that being the case, it amazes me that we’re getting feedback on the issue from godaddy whereas all we get from ukhost4u is stonewalling. It’s not even godaddy’s problem, and they can be bothered to talk to us.

Let me go back to the bit about “costing them money” and that’s where this thing trips over the dumb line backwards. ukhost4u have this really fine line. As Dubber quoted from the call centre guy: “No the payment is due today. We haven’t seen it, and so we’ve shut your site down.”

Let’s be really blunt about the economics of hosting here. Yeah it’s pretty cheap for us to buy right now, but then so is the cost of hard drives. Hosting companies have pennies of overhead per hosting account, and the gross profit margin on each contract is pretty immense. I know this because I know how much mark up I could put on hosting I was reselling.

Yep, that’s right your hosting has massive retail and massive wholesale mark ups on it.

There is so much fat to trim on the hosting cash cow. And you have to take the rough with the smooth. We used that fat profit to write off a few deals down the line. You know, when all the talking to customer stuff failed, we’d renew their domain name for another year, try again to talk to them, then when we’d done our best, we’d let it go and make a tiny wee loss.

We did that because it was the right thing to do, because we’d built room into the system and because we didn’t want to piss off prominent bloggers.

You hear that? Could be pennies dropping at ukhost4u headquarters…