– The following is an E-mail I sent earlier today to Matt Heaton of BlueHost.com. This Samadhisoft Blog is hosted on BlueHost’s servers and in the year that I’ve been dealing with this company I have had nothing but admiration for how they do things.
– If, after reading this testamonial, you decide to check BlueHost out and perhaps signup, do me a favor and go to the BlueHost website using the small BlueHost ad you’ll find if you scroll down the right side of this page. On top of everything else they do that’s cool, they’ll credit me $65 if you sign up with them after accessing them through my ad. It’ll cost you nothing extra and I get $65 – now is that cool or what?
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Matt,
I’ve never written one of these before. Frankly, when it comes to computers and the Internet, I’m long-in-the-tooth and fairly hard to please. But, I’ve been with BlueHost now for nearly a year and I am still extremely impressed at the value and the service I get for my $6.95/month.
Just now, I talked with two of your technical folks on two calls 15 minutes apart and they were both quick to take my call and both very clear and knowledgeable as they helped me. And this has been my experience on every single tech call since day one with BlueHost.
I find working with your company far and away the best experience I’ve had with any similar company and maybe with any company I’ve ever worked with in any domain.
My fear is that something this good just can’t last in today’s dog-eat-dog capitalistic free-for-all. I fear that if BlueHost is this good, some big fish like Google or Microsoft will come and gobble them up and then turn their value and quality into the same everything-for-maximum-profit-and-minimum-effort pabulum that most of the market is full of. In this nightmare, your tech support will go to India where script-drones will deaden its sharp edges into utter mediocrity. Calls to tech-support will go into long queues where the unfortunate will be forced to listen to inane advertisements for services they don’t want or need. And any small change to DNS servers or whatever will incur a transaction charge like the banks require for every small thing and God help you if you ask for anything that a non-technical individual operating within their script can’t noodle out. Your $6.95/mo price will be adjusted upwards in search for the sweet-spot of maximum profit which must reside just below the nearest competitor’s price-point.
I’m a bit cynical about some aspects of Capitalism. I don’t think that maxima of quality and value necessarily reside at the same location as the profit maxima. After all, the profit-centric idea of extracting the maximum of my money while serving me the minimum of service doesn’t exactly put me in mind of quality.
I don’t think that everything a corporation does should be judged by the single yardstick of what the investment returns are to the investors next quarter. I don’t think customer loyalty is something that should be distilled and optimized by legions of marketing psychologists working out how to dazzle and manipulate the unwise and the unaware subliminally.
In the past, some companies, IMHO, had a grip on the equations of quality and reputation. I’m thinking here of American Express and Hewlett-Packard. But, they both slipped under the waves beneath the guidance of profit-oriented marketing gurus. And look what’s become of Ted Turner’s CNN Headline News. It’s gone from being a national resource to becoming a Fox News clone with just a slightly different mini-skirt on. A lot of the malaise in the world and in America in particular is because of this ascendancy of the short term gains and goals over the long term consequences in all things.
But, I digress, so back to the point. In short, you are an utter phenomenon in the market and I can only hope you will last and endure. I’ve told a number of folks about your company and when I find myself describing everything one gets for the $6.95/mo., it sounds so unrealistic and over-the-top that I feel like most folks won’t believe me because it is all too good to be true.
You’ve got a very loyal customer here and I sincerely wish and hope that whatever vision of Capitalism and corporation building you subscribe to might get successfully propagated out into today’s markets which very badly need to hear it.
Feel free to use any and/or all of this testimonial as you like. I’m going to post this letter on my Blog as well.
With my very best wishes to you,
Dennis Gallagher