That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner.
Hetzner team if you are reading this, although I love email platform, is there any way that your support stops being AI (which annoyed me) but rather you can have an discord,matrix (preferred),telegram, heck IRC or even slack for what its worth where I can message the team if I wanted a custom solution on top of hetzner etc.
Fwiw, Upcloud provided support and heard me out even if I didnt share my credit card info so massive respects to them and I am sure that my experience with hetzner has always been positive (they responded to me once on hackernews which was peak) but maybe if they are reading this (then hello!) and yea, please hetzner I hope you change your contact page to be more suitable or hear my complaints as I like hetzner a lot too
Personally, I am starting to value contact support which I thought didn't matter a lot nowadays. It doesn't matter if its cheap or not but rather if I can talk to their team once about any product and see if I can match their terms of service and similar basically or other issues in general too.
Also Hetzner, another point, I would love to be able to write articles for you and get the 50$ (I will read it again to see if I can "write" according to the conditions but yea) and similar but once again I need a hetzner account which required credit card/debit card validation.
> That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner.
In one word: fraud. I've worked at a company similar to Hetzner, and the "add a credit card first" is the single most effective way to weed out 99% of abusers. People that will each up swaths of compute and mine crypto, ruining the service for everyone. Or hosting CSAM material. Or participating in botnets. Or sending spam. All those makes both the company AND the clients suffer.
You still get the occasional Pakistani bank that allows the emission of unlimited credit cards for fraudsters or the stolen cards (stripe goes a long way for this), but it simply makes the business bearable.
So yeah, we were not thrilled to enforce CC for signup. Believe it or not, even marketing or sales hated it, because it introduces friction in the signup tunnel.
As to re: logged in to open tickets, it is a necessity to avoid customer getting their account stolen. As a customer you receive fake "change your password now!" emails, as a company you receive fake "i've lost my password!" emails. That's the sad way the world is right now. Account theft for hosting providers is a real thing, because the stakes can be very very high.
I just wanted to inquire about something which wasn't related to my account itself per se. So I think that one of the things which can be done by hetzner in this context is atleast having a community where people can talk to them (similar to scaleway's slack)
I am kind of involving myself in such a community so I have a lot of questions to ask and just having acquaintances involved in such industry. Is there any way that I can be able to contact you if I have more queries about this industry in general?
Having a closed forum helps a lot to avoid this.
Basically I dread the wall of email support sometimes because its too exhausting, assumes I am a company myself, assumes I must have a website, assumes I have a role at said supposed company.
Also I do not know in how many hours they might respond, Have they even read my message etc.
having something like telegram,matrix etc. can help but also at that point, I wonder if they all use email, can something like delta.chat be used to provide an instant experience to the email experience?
What are your thoughts on this, I am genuinely curious if delta.chat can provide a meaningful improvement over email because I dread having to open all of these things and then fear getting ghosted or fear that I would be able to explain myself only in a few messages worth of time maybe answering them to their questions,asking them questions etc. (I hope it may make sense)
Seconded. Used to work at an MSP that had a customer that did "micro-hosting" on a free tier. Just sign up, put data, run w/ it.
There were weeks where I emailed my FBI contact 3-4 times with CSAM links, spam, or evidence of DDoS attacks. Crypto was just getting off the ground then but could totally see that being a thing if the timing were different.
Customer was willing to address it quickly and paid even after we gave them the "fuck-off" quote, so we kept em for a while...
Also, support often are happy to answer general inquiries not related to the product, as long as it's not for outsourcing reasons (not their job to help you set up Apache). They may even get you in touch with someone more technical if needed.
Anyways, feel free to shoot an email yes, username at me dot com.
The downside of IM like Telegram or Matrix or Slack is that it's a broadcast bottle-in-the-sea way of communication. It's everyone's job to answer there, thus it's no one's job to answer there. OTOH contact mail boxes are often direct at people whose job is to read it.
Like, I definitely feel exhausted and dont contact those contact pages because of it, I have shared the pain points in the previous thread but they assume me mostly to have my own company, have a position and have a website etc.
I do not mind contacting them via email if its simple. But in reality, it isn't
In my opinion, starting out, I think that companies should definitely have instant messengers as I have had lots of appreciation to those providers who kinda did but anyways, my point here is that those look like "fuck off contact pages" to me and I feel exhausted and tired and don't even contact them and would much rather work with someone who has a discord and I contacted them personally and dm'd them and they understand my customer support solution lets say.
What are your thoughts on the opinion, I definitely get where you are coming from, but I just don't know, maybe make the mail so easy and not make it feel like a void ykwim?
Very interesting that you mention twitter, my problem is that, I do not have twitter and do not intend on having one. Maybe mastodon?
Sorry for making this multi threaded simultaneous discussions lol but as we were talking about contact pages, I think that the best discussion that we can have in my opinion with my ideals and etc. too is if a company is active on mastodon. Like we were talking how IM's etc. can be ghosted etc. which is fair too (one of my issues on OVH discord was solved, the other wasnt and I was ghosted yes)
Having a frequent mastodon presence can be huge for such a company then. Maybe that can be a compromise I am willing to do if they mention in their website that they are active on mastodon or similar. I think it might be the best way then.
Like imagine a company's contact page said that "we are active on mastodon and you can (ping?) us on there regarding any issues/support inqueries"
Fediverse definitely needs an private dm features similar to twitter then I guess too but this might be outside of the scope of this discussion which might I say I enjoyed so have a nice day sir!