Posts by JoeTwoshot

Backup a sec – is hard drive reliability improving? Annual failure rate from Backblaze comes in at its lowest yet

Re: Technically great, but

Sorry, but no - once bitten, twice shy.

I have absolutely -zero- problems with the fact the billing issue happened; I can understand fraud checks, security changes, in fact any change at all, things simply change over time.

With the best will and skill in the world it can well be once you've made changes there will be customers get tripped up by them. -Not- a problem.

But when a customer is telling you he can't pay because of the changes you made to billing, you need to find a way for him to pay. -This did not occur-. It didn't even remotely occur. I recall comments like "we will look into this and we may change it in the future".

Having had that experience, being two days away from losing my backups, but currently having a working solution where I can pay, I am -terrified- of getting support involved. It works now. Support can only make it worse.

(I think Support went silent because they had no solution to the problem. They could hardy write to me directly and tell me my account was going to be deleted and there was nothing they would or could do. I remember when I put in the fake address I received an email from support telling me I'd paid and asking me if I had any other problems!)

Technically great, but I came within two days of loosing everything because they messed up billing

I had a terrible experence with BB.

Their service from a pricing and technical point of view was absolutely first class - best in the world. I love using them.

Their service from a *billing* and *administrative* point of view was very nearly catastrophic, and very nearly destroyed my backups.

A service isn't just technical. If a customer is blocked from paying by changing you make to your billing system and you're going to delete his account because of it he'll lose his backups just as if you messed up the hard disks.

I had been using them for some time, year or two, and I came to change my payment card.

Turns out they had introduced new constraints on the cards - rules like "card holder address must be in the country of the card", "IP address of whoever is providing a card must be in the country of the card" and so on.

Upshot? back when I joined - and uploaded a metric ton of backup data, took two months - I could pay, and now I couldn't.

After about six weeks of utterly futile non-conversation with BB support, which ended up with them going silent, I had two days to go before my account was deleted and I lost all my backups.

So I faked an address - I'm now the Royal Albert Hall - and the stupid bloody address check they have, which blocked my card and took me to the edge of loosing my account and which took up so much time and effort to try to fix - *ACCEPTED IT*.

So I think they're idiots, when it comes to billing.

I don't dare change now my card with them, and when I get a bit of free time, I need to do the investgiation to find another provider.

That's a huge shame, because in every other way except catastrophic data loss through billing incompetence, they're ideal.