I have to rebuild my blog. Why? Due to a fraud concern, my bank pro-actively reissued my credit card with a new number. After this happened I learned how often I use it to automatically pay for things. One of those things was my blog hosting service. Unfortunately the timing coincided with the expiration of my multi-year contract and a high-intensity period of work during which I was not posting. When I finally went to create another post I found that my blog was gone. Apparently my hosting provider had sent me an email or two letting me know that my service was up for renewal and then deleted my site 10 days later.

Now I admit that this was my fault. I could have updated my credit card. I could have read the email that was automatically sent to the “updates” tab of my gmail account (along with all of the other marketing emails my hosting provider sends) but I did not. My provider did the reasonable thing, they discontinued my service since I didn’t pay. However, they could have provided great service, they could have backed up my site and archived it just in case I came back. How much does storage cost? Not much. They missed an opportunity to provide great service by protecting me from myself and as a result I shopped around for a new provider and found a better one at a lower price. Reasonable service is not enough in a competitive environment. To paraphrase a famous saying, you can retain some of your customers some of the time with reasonable service, but you can’t retain all of them without great service.