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by RIMR 3788 days ago
Good assessment. As someone who paid for the personal plan, and watched it implode from the inside, I get the exact impression you do.

The problem was the number of mistakes made:

* Offering the support line as a "literal" replacement for emergency services.

* Including a racial slur in a 503 page.

* Falsely advertising the number of servers you can create as "Unlimited", when the limit is actually 2.

* Use of a generic bootstrap theme with minimal modification.

* 404'd refund and legal pages.

* Not established as a LLC.

* No way to manage billing profiles (in violation of Stripe TOS)

* Broken and untested remix of Ubuntu Server.

* No account management portal - You can't change or reset your password at all.

* Advertised as a finished product for use by businesses, when it appears to have barely been tested in-house.

This is how you lose your business, and then get sued into bankruptcy. This kid should be happy he just lost a couple thousand dollars in server hosting and refund fees, rather than millions and the loss of his credit reputation for life.

Learn a lesson from this, would-be entrepreneurs of HN. Don't do what this kid did.

1 comments

The fact that the pricing plans were taken as-is from an HTML template (that had nothing to do with hosting) is a pretty good sign that the project is a bit rough around the edges.

A good lesson indeed, if you pretend to be serious and do a decent job, people are quite likely to take you seriously.