What's Your Effective Policy In This Situation

C

Collabora

Account Disabled
Let's say you have a good customer on a 3 GB plan and you are charging $5/mo. Let' say also that the site is fully optimized and well under any "fair-use" max levels, as found in TOS.

Moving forward, suppose he now needs 3.1 GB. Would you force him to upgrade to a more expensive plans (say a 15 GB plan for $10) that offers much more than he needs, or allocate a bit more space for him as a courtesy?
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Collabora said:
Let's say you have a good customer on a 3 GB plan and you are charging $5/mo. Let' say also that the site is fully optimized and well under any "fair-use" max levels, as found in TOS.

Moving forward, suppose he now needs 3.1 GB. Would you force him to upgrade to a more expensive plans (say a 15 GB plan for $10) that offers much more than he needs, or allocate a bit more space for him as a courtesy?
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If it's Disc Space, i would suggest upgrading to a higher plan, which would give them more of all resources, otherwise i would charge them equiv. to $1.50 for a further 1GB.

if they dont want either then no problem as they will continue being charged the overage charge of £0.0020 per MB over their allocation
 
Hello,

if it's a good long time customer, I will give him the 100mo for free... Since he will or have probably brings me new customers...

Regards,
 
webalternative said:
Hello,

if it's a good long time customer, I will give him the 100mo for free... Since he will or have probably brings me new customers...

Regards,
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We do this for free anytime one of our clients need a little more stuffs on their hosting needs.

Hosting is just something we do for our business clients and to save us the headaches of having to deal with a lot of hosting companies.

And you're correct, word of mouth is your best marketing campaign if it's good word of mouth.
 
our method has never effected our business.

our clients have commented on us charging a overage charge rather than have their sites go down if they go over until the following month. They like this as it means their sites remain online.

I have yet to take payment for an overage invoice as i cancel these, its just a way to keep clients sites online.

I once had a clients overage invoice come in at £5,500.
 
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Really depends on how have you made your configuration. For example, our shared accounts are "caged" so to speak and each client gets plenty of all resources and we never impose any extra fees for overages. When the various plans are made with steady increases of those resources (and price), upgrading makes much more sense than scaling. So instead of bigger gaps (jump from 3GB to 15GB), you can have something in the middle (like a 7GB plan).

But again, its like comparing apples to oranges. Even though we are in the same business, many of us have completely different server configs, marketing approach, price formation factors etc.
 
As mentioned, it really depends. If it's 100-500 MB, then sure (especially at $5/mo for 3 GB). If he needs an additional gigabtye, it's a different situation entirely, and I'd suggest an upgrade.

The thing with these situations is to just use your gut feeling. A happy customer is a good customer, and bending rules can be a part of building that good, long-standing relationship. As long as that does not interfere with yor business plans or profitability, there's little reason not to.
 
MightWeb-Marcus said:
As mentioned, it really depends. If it's 100-500 MB, then sure (especially at $5/mo for 3 GB).
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so this month then go over and ask for an extra 100MB, so you give then this, then next month the same thing happens, so you give them another 100MB, so in a few months you have given them an extra GB for free.
 
easyhostmedia said:
so this month then go over and ask for an extra 100MB, so you give then this, then next month the same thing happens, so you give them another 100MB, so in a few months you have given them an extra GB for free.
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It isn't difficult to be reasonable with a client. If they are asking for 100 MB, you can give them 200 MB, but tell them that if their website outgrows this requirement, then you'll have to upgrade the plan because clearly they are outgrowing this and likely other requirements as well. I think a client would actually appreciate this more than immediately being pushed into an upgrade for something this small.
 
Artashes said:
It isn't difficult to be reasonable with a client. If they are asking for 100 MB, you can give them 200 MB, but tell them that if their website outgrows this requirement, then you'll have to upgrade the plan because clearly they are outgrowing this and likely other requirements as well. I think a client would actually appreciate this more than immediately being pushed into an upgrade for something this small.
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That's why i suggest to clients they take an extra GB for £1.50 rather than upgrading to another plan.
Most of my plans have enough resources for clients, so this never happens much, also i get notices when any account on our servers nears their limit, so i can contact client.
 
Keeping your customers is one of the most important stages of your marketing. If it's a really good customer and I mean he is loyal to you, do not couse too many difficulties I would totally reward him - I'd give this space for free for sure so that he would feel important and maybe would share his positive experiences with other people.
 
It depends.

Giving away a couple hundred MB or even a GB is no big deal. I have done it and will continue to do it, if I feel that is the right solution.

However you need to take it as a case-by-case. Look at the customer, their site, their overall resource usage. Is their site steadily growing? Do they just need another 100MB or would they be better off on the next plan up.

If they just need 100MB, give it to them.

If they need a higher plan, take the time to let them know and explain the reasoning. Most customers will be glad you too the time to analyze their needs and consult with them on how a higher plan may benefit them.

Then give them the option! No one likes to hear "Were sorry, you can no longer use the ___ plan. You have to pay us more for the ____ plan".
However, if you tell them "You have exceeded your allowed disk space by 100MB. As a loyal customer, we will give you an addition 150MB for free. However we feel you should consider moving up to our ____ plan because _____"
 
This does not just effect giving extra space, A majority of our clients are resellers, initially resellers are allowed 20 accounts under their reseller account, but if they ask we will add extra accounts for them at no extra cost to them as they need them.
But recently even though our server shows 72% full we had to purchase an extra GB of ram and this meant an upgraded Litespeed licence, so we decided to look at resellers and some have 30+ accounts under them, it was decided that we would cap all resellers to 25 accounts under them. Emails went out to all resellers with options to 1) reduce their accounts to under 25. 2) upgrade to a VPS. 3) take out another reseller account on one of our other servers and split their accounts between the 2. so far 1 has reduced their accounts, 3 have taken out a reseller account on another server to split accounts and 6 have opted for their own VPS, still a few have not responded to what they want to do.
 
Collabora said:
Let's say you have a good customer on a 3 GB plan and you are charging $5/mo. Let' say also that the site is fully optimized and well under any "fair-use" max levels, as found in TOS.

Moving forward, suppose he now needs 3.1 GB. Would you force him to upgrade to a more expensive plans (say a 15 GB plan for $10) that offers much more than he needs, or allocate a bit more space for him as a courtesy?
.
.
.
Click to expand...

What I would do is to offer a "half freeze" between the two. Charge the customer but not for a whole resource upgrade. For instance if you were charging $2.00/GB then only charge him like $0.25 for his overage of 100MB.
 
What i hate is when you go to look at a website and you see is a ' this account has reached their bandwidth limit' notice. This does not look good and does not look good for the client. This is why we chose to set it so that if a client goes over then they get charged £0.0020 per MB automatically, so it keeps their website up all the time, but warning notices are sent well before it gets to that stage. Overage invoices are usually cancelled. We had 1 clients who would on average get an overage invoice of £800 a month, after 6 months i suggested he upgrade his plan as it was clear the plan no longer suited his needs, but got no response, so when this happened on month 8 i just let the invoice remain, so it went into suspend mode. This got his attention and a reply. He upgraded to a VPS which more suited his needs. this client now has 3 VPS with me.
 
I would go ahead and give the extra space as the good will will pay off in the long term word of mouth advertising the client will give you.
 
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