Why should you promote upgrades
I enquired with my hosting company (Hetzner) about upgrading the amount of disk space—and only disk space. See, I am planning to upload my photos, and they take space—lots of it—and it’s the only thing I’ve come close to using. The bandwidth is great; the amount of email addresses is ridiculous (I only use 2, and they’re both just forwards anyway), and so on.
The options available to me are:
- Upgrade, which doubles my disk space
- Buy 10 MB more for R5 more.
Here’s the downside for the upgrade: they’re charging me R49 for it. The logic told to me is that they have to manually do the changes to quotas, etc. This, for me, is horribly flawed because:
- They have this great, "award-winning" H-Console—which did the entire set of my account changes automatically
- They don’t charge for downgrading.
This is really the part that shocks me—I could understand if they only charged for downgrades (penalizing the end user in a way) or charged for both (due to the "manual" work required)—but they don’t. They seem happier to have people downgrade than upgrade, which, in my mind, means they’ll make less money.
Anyway, the other funny part of this story is that if I pay R5 per 10 MB and buy the 100 MB, I’ll end up paying the same amount as if I upgraded—but without the penalty for an upgrade.
I actually think this is a horrible side effect of one of the value propositions Hetzner likes to tell people: "Stable pricing since 1999". The problem with stable pricing is that no one ever goes back and reviews it or applies all those business lessons learned in the last eight years, like getting existing customers to spend more money being easier than getting new customers.
Note: This isn’t an issue about the amount of money but rather the logic behind it.