Missed Business Opportunities

While motorbiking around the island of Koh Jum (pictured, featuring one of the stunning sunsets we witnessed), we visited a cafe that was part of a larger resort. The cafe was overlooking the pool, which was entirely empty as it is currently coming in to the low season in Thailand. We had our swimming stuff with us as we had planned to hit the beach but the pool was becoming more enticing.

Some hotels have a policy of charging outside guests for use of their pool and we were more than willing to pay for access.

After ordering a large lunch at their restaurant, we inquired whether we could use the pool.

“No,” came the gruff reply.

Please Let Me Give You Money

It reminded me of another situation that I recently had with my hosting provider. We had a fixed bandwidth allowance which had been more than adequate up until that point. That was until one of our posts on Never Ending Voyage was shared on Stumble Upon. The resulting traffic crushed our server and our users ended up facing Bandwidth Exceeded notices.

I had read their hosting terms and conditions and was under the mistaken impression that they would simply charge us extra for the overage but apparently it didn’t apply to their shared hosting packages.

A few frantic emails later and we had upgraded our plan with the promise that we just had to email them again if we needed to increase the limit in future. This was an improvement to the situation, but still less than ideal. I can’t think of a good technical reason why, since theyre already tracking usage, they couldn’t have a script that works out how much I went over at the end of the month then bills me for the difference:

float charge = ( totalBandwidthUsed - monthlyAllowance ) * overageFee;

if ( charge > 0 ) calculateAndSendBill( charge );