Question

I received an email from a customer that has been with me for about a year now and this morning I get an email from him, below is the main focus of the email. Just looking for advice because I really don't offer site promotion other than submitting to search engines..am I missing something should this be part of my web hosting and design packages?

You've been pretty blaise about my web presence. Can you boost my presence on the web or should I just resign myself to less than high performance presence on the internet

You're in the web hosting business; not the website development business.
There are places that will develope websites. And they cost money.
I would just tell him what you said in this thread, "We submit your site to search engines. We could recommend some website development sites."

You probably don't want him for a customer if he, not only, wants you to host his site; but expects you to promote and develope it too. What was he thinking? You buy a domain name and then whoever hosts your site develops it for you? :rolleyes:

These are the type of customers that make me crazy !

<skip to next message, me blowing off steam!!>

They don't know a single thing about websites, or even internet, They expect you to do things you never do for your customers (you expect your customers to be able to upload their crummy pages themselves). But hey, this guy is new, so i'll give him a break and help him, they don't thank you because they think its just standaard service that you install their mailingscripts in their pages, or spend a hour and a half on the telephone to explain that they really must upload their images also to be able to see them in their webpages, they call you up again because something is really wrong with the server "they still only see a red cross where their images suppose to be", so you tell them to put them in a directory with the same name they have on their homecomputer, then they get really annoyed, because you did'nt tell them before (you did 5 times, but everytime they ignored you probably because they didn't understand what you mean).
So after you uploaded their pages, installed their scripts, put the right permissions on all the files, finally set a email forward because "your email server is still down!", you have to wait 4 months for them to pay their lower then low budget account.
I had a women called me up once really aggrivated (i have no idea how to spell that but don't give a **** at the moment), why she didn't recieve email. To make a very long story short, (about 20 minutes) she didn't have a internet account/connection (no idea how she found me).
:angry: :angry: :angry: :angry: :angry: :angry:

I feel a lot better now thank you.
Please post your "even worse"experiences below to make me feel even better :)

Agreed.

If you want to offer the services of trying to get a customer's site search engine listed, by all means. But that's not part of the hosting package.

It's amazing what people expect for a few bucks a month. We've had people expect us to provide them with a website, inventory control, banners, pictures of their products (like we can get those), accounting help, etc.

And, as mentioned above, these people are usually the ones who gripe the most about a few dollars for service. Not worth it.