Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones

CONGRATULATIONS, DREAMHOST, YOU JUST MADE MY BOOK

I used to have a web site for my second book, Join the Conversation. It was a beautiful web site (www.jointheconversation.us) that featured a public/open blog for which any reader of the book could register to become a contributing guest writer. It contained multimedia, various contact information, and a range of other related or useful information associated with the book. Then, one day—it was gone. I was left with nothing but an unceremonious message that eloquently read: error id: “bad_httpd_conf.” After a long and laborious search, I found out that this was associated with a company called Dreamhost, the apparent hosting company for my site. I wouldn’t know, as I wasn’t the person who originally set up this service. After a few unsuccessful attempts to contact technical support (I didn’t have log-in credentials, as I didn’t know I was even a customer), I managed to find an obscure e-mail address associated with “sales.” Long story short: It turns out that the credit card used to procure this service had since expired, and an invoice for $190 had not been paid.

Here’s the incredible part: Dreamhost callously suspends the account and then deletes the entire web site. Let me repeat that: they deleted the entire web site. Every single file. Every single blog entry. All. Gone. Forever. This is a company that trades in data and, for some unexplained reason, does not have backup or the capacity to archive or store files for extended ...