As you may have noticed, we recently removed all of the “BBB Accredited” images from our website. That’s because for the time being we will not longer be affiliated with the Better Business Bureau. The reason being is outlined below.
In January, the BBB announced they would be changing their rating system. Part of the change to the rating system included the way that the BBB would be recognizing the size of a given company. In the past, the BBB determined business size by the number of clients a company had. The new determination is based on total revenue, instead.
This means that instead of the BBB rating being based on the number of complaints compared to your total amount of clients, the rating is being gathered by number of complaints based on revenue. In theory, now you could have a company with 5 clients and a gross revenue of $500,000. If 2 of your clients file BBB complaints you can still have an A because it doesn’t matter that 40% of your client base filed a complaint. Instead, your rating will be high because you made $500,000 and only had 2 customers complain.
This change in the way their system rates businesses negatively affected our score, since we have a good number of customers but our revenue is relatively low comparatively because our hosting prices are so low. The BBB saw this as us being a smaller company and thus, lowered our rating from an A to a B+. Absolutely nothing changed on our end, yet our rating was lowered.
This, to us, just doesn’t seem fair. We work hard to provide you with an affordable service, both short term and long term. According to the BBB, though, 9 complaints over the course of 3 years just isn’t good enough because we simply don’t make enough money. Frankly, that’s a bit disheartening. And that’s why we are no longer accredited.