@angstrom said:
It's an artifact of the present example that @jarland has some (or most?) of the personal information of the customers of his resellers. As I understand it, this is because @jarland retains central control over catching spammers, and to do this, he needs to be able to identify those users who spam, whether those users are his customers or customers of his resellers
Nah it's just WHMCS passes the email you place an order with to DirectAdmin over the API, which ends up at /usr/local/directadmin/data/users/username/user.conf as the email= variable.
@angstrom said:
I may be going against the grain here (!), but as far as I'm aware, it's not at all conventional for a seller to have this clause/condition with their resellers
And frankly, I don't think that it would be in @jarland 's interest to have this clause/condition with his resellers
At the end of the day, there are advantages and disadvantages in buying from a reseller. A disadvantage is that a reseller may be more likely to disappear than the seller. (An advantage is that customer service may be better with a reseller)
Nonetheless, let's bear in mind that the case of the disappearance of NexusBytes is about as extreme as it gets. In ordinary cases, if a reseller decides to close shop, they give some advance notice so that their customers have time to migrate elsewhere. In such cases, once such a notice is given, the seller and/or other resellers are free to post promotions in order to try to attract these potential customers. This also allows other resellers to compete with the seller in offering such promotions, which is a good thing
Of course. Any seller is at any time allowed to make an offer to anybody they want, that's called free market. But that is not what we meant.
To be clear, I was arguing against inserting a clause/condition of the kind suggested into a contract between seller and reseller
What I was referring to was more of a direct communication with the actual customers. As the provider probably has at least a way of direct communication with the customers, the provider can do a direct offer that external parties would not be able to.
But "the (actual) customers" are strictly speaking customers of the reseller, not of the seller
It's an artifact of the present example that @jarland has some (or most?) of the personal information of the customers of his resellers. As I understand it, this is because @jarland retains central control over catching spammers, and to do this, he needs to be able to identify those users who spam, whether those users are his customers or customers of his resellers
But this artifact of the present example doesn't generalize. NexusBytes also rented dedicated servers, on which he sold VPSes. The dedicated server providers had no idea about who NexusBytes sold VPSes to, because these users were NexusBytes's customers and not customers of the dedicated server providers
When NexusBytes stopped paying the bills, there were forum members (perhaps more on OGF than here) who felt that the dedicated server providers should keep the dedicated servers turned on for just a while longer so that NexusBytes's customers could save their data. If I recall well, there was one dedicated server provider who did (as a voluntary gesture) and another who didn't (perhaps more than one who didn't)
As you might guess, my view was/is that the dedicated server providers who turned off the servers when NexusBytes stopped paying the bills were beyond reproach
Has anyone claimed otherwise? I am sure I have not, I defended them in several threads here as they had no obligation to keep anything running once the bills were due.
But having a clause that allows a provider to offer customers a way out is not the same as forcing a provider to offer them a way out.
Look at the case with Nexusbytes, for months after the deadpool customers still showed up here asking what was happening, completely unaware that Nexusbytes were long gone. Posting promotions and refugee offers on lowendtalk would have done absolutely nothing to help them. And these are just the very few that found lowendtalk, my guess is 90% of the customers did not and are still completely unaware of what happened. As a provider you could have given them a fair warning and notified them of what was going on, and offered them a way out or simply pointed them to other resellers or even other providers.
My conclusion from this is merely that resellers may show a higher tendency to disappear than sellers show
As far as NexusBytes was concerned, yes, it was generally bad luck for his customers . Yes. Pech gehabt. These things can happen
But I'd still be against inserting a clause/condition of the kind suggested into a contract between seller and reseller
But why? If the seller does not want to use the clause, he does not have to. But having the clause there gives him the possibility to try and help the customers. And of course, if the customers do not want to accept the offer, they don't have to.
I can not see any downsides of such a clause, and it opens up for being able to offer the customers an easy way forward instead of being forced to just watch the shit burn.
Comments
Nah it's just WHMCS passes the email you place an order with to DirectAdmin over the API, which ends up at /usr/local/directadmin/data/users/username/user.conf as the email= variable.
Do everything as though everyone you’ll ever know is watching.
Has anyone claimed otherwise? I am sure I have not, I defended them in several threads here as they had no obligation to keep anything running once the bills were due.
But having a clause that allows a provider to offer customers a way out is not the same as forcing a provider to offer them a way out.
But why? If the seller does not want to use the clause, he does not have to. But having the clause there gives him the possibility to try and help the customers. And of course, if the customers do not want to accept the offer, they don't have to.
I can not see any downsides of such a clause, and it opens up for being able to offer the customers an easy way forward instead of being forced to just watch the shit burn.