Billing Invoicing Change
Last night was billing invoicing night, and we’ve implemented some changes that people have been asking for.
One is that if you have an invoice generated, you get a notice – we’ve had this request quite a bit, even for the zero balance invoices that are generated every single month even when you have nothing at all due. So, a lot of you that have never seen an invoice notification except when you have a balance due got one last night. You would not get regular invoice notices previously if you have a lifetime account, or because you pay anything other than monthly. The purpose for this change actually made sense when people asked for it, for numerous reasons.
The first is there’s a small group of people that actually forget they have an active account, especially if they paid for two years and then forgot it. These notices can prompt folks to deal with their accounts, either by starting to work on their site, or canceling early to avoid any risk of further charges for a site that they no longer desire to have. Not sending notices for zero balance invoices and not sending out newsletters through billing (instead using news alerts like this) meant that for some, their account kind of went into stealth mode where they could just forget about it.
While common business wisdom dictates that your favorite customers are those that pay you and then ignore you, the simple fact is that forgotten sites present some level of a security risk to the servers. If people are not going to actively use the sites and what’s more, install things that they do not actively manage, we really don’t want them installed. So, this serves as a reminder of “Hey, you have a site!” so that people will be reminded that it should be looked at, or canceled if it no longer serves its purpose.
The second thing that helps is that we will get bounces – if your email is not up to date, especially on the longer billing periods, we’ll know early. We can start looking at the site to see if there is an alternative email listed, or search for a contact email in other ways. It’s imperative we have a valid way to contact everyone that has a site hosted here, and when we need to contact you is not the time we want to have to start trying to hunt you down.
And the third purpose is simply so we can impart little reminders that there is news and information available on various places like Twitter, this blog, and the Network Page. We still get emails regarding changes made in 2007 that people didn’t know about because they didn’t follow the links in their cPanel to keep up with the news. This will be an understated way we can email the pointers to that info without having to condense all of this into newsletter updates.
