Best of the ISP-Lists

When Hit Low, Take the High Road

Members of the ISP-Webhosting list provide sound and reputable advice to a webhost who acquired customers from a competitor only to find the competitor blocking DNS and redirection services.

[June 26, 2002]

On the ISP-Webhosting list in June, JJ queried,

"I have a competitor who experienced some downtime during the past week, and two of his customers transferred their accounts to us. The competitor responded by blocking our C blocks at his border router. We provide backup/mirror, DNS, and redirection services for many of his customers, who now are being blocked. Our mutual customers have been in contact with him about this, and the response they're getting is that he will no longer allow the use of outside DNS or any redirection services, and must transfer DNS back to him. How should I handle this?"

A number of respondents suggested that the situation should soon take care of itself

[RR noted] "All I can say is, this competitor is going to lose lot of business. He's just trying to interfere with your business: the DNS redirection doesn't interfere with his business at all. Sounds like you'll soon be driving him out of business, due to his practice of alienating his customers."

[NT added] "I've run into a few angry competitors who didn't like the fact that we 'took' a customer from them. The bottom line is, behavior like this only serves to damage him: most people don't want to deal with business owners who get personal about problems. If he were smart, he would have just let the customers go and dropped it."

[DN agreed] "I had something similar happen with a competitor in town who also happened to be a friend. He offended a number of his customers by not keeping appointments, and they eventually found their way to me. Now he's accusing me of deliberately going after his customers, and it looks like our friendship is about to end. Sometimes it just doesn't pay to get out of bed…"

Others offered some advice on how to take action:

[HB recommended] "Send him a letter, CC your customers on the letter, and let him know you are CCing them. Ask him to open up the gates or at least provide a reason in writing as to why he won't. Do it all very publicly, but also very tastefully. Take the higher road. According to The Art of War: 'When the enemy is angry, irritate him.'"

[GR countered] "The last time a competitor's webhosting server went down, he had redundant hard drives—but one had failed and he hadn't replaced it, and he didn't have any backups or copies of the websites. I put a big ad in the local paper offering we hosting on our UNIX servers, saying our servers never go down. I picked up a number of his customers—and the funny thing is, he ended up colocating with me a few months later."

—End