A couple of my sites have been down since 24th December even though I paid for renewal for another year of hosting. They sent me an email message saying there was a billing error, but I notice form my bank account that it has already been charged, therefore, this was a mistake on their part. I have sent them numerous emails about this but their customer service seems pathetic, to say the least. They haven't got back to me yet. Should I seek compensation for the amount I would have made while the sites have been down?
Qwestcommunications Actually you should yes, but if you'll going to get any compensation is an other question. This really is unacceptable so I would do it if I were you. The best thing will be of course to not depend on hostings and to have at least a VPS, or better yet a dedicated server. Stay calm even if it's hard and don't ruin your Holiday mood any further than this. Good luck and Happy Holydays
you will be hard pushed to actually do this, are the hosts based where in the same city or even country? Also what are their promises regarding uptime, as they could quite easily say its still in line with what they promise your site will be online for. Not just for the money but the year or however long you have been with them, you cant prove it, unless they have 3rd party keeping track of it which some hosts do have
That's horrible, I can some what understand the delay since it was the holiday but it should of been taken care of by now
I bet if you read their TOS, there is all sorts of legal junk about no liability, waranties, no blah blah blah.... BUT I would try anyway, stories about bad customer service tend to travel more than the stories about good customer service.
Getting compensation for lost revenue is an almost impossible task. If you try to go down that road it WILL have to go to court and providing enough evidence to prove your case will be a nightmare. Just take it as a lesson learned and switch hosts. I personally use 1&1 and while their prices aren't excellent their reliability is kickass.
But it can be that the web host rather want to give you a free month than loosing you as a cutomer. This is a very likely scenario.
Best thing you could do is post your story here, get it Dugg, and tell them what you have done and what you are looking for in recourse...
yeh i am working for webhosting company. Really, it was not any error. it was all about holiday many people wher on leave for christmas party. So ther was no proper support from tech side. After all everyone should get little freedom from work na which is the hosting company?
Guess what? I had to unsespend my account be paying again, believe it or not. That just sucks. Its a US based host even though I am in the UK. I went for a US host because there are substantial benefits e.g. cost, better bandwidth, space deals, etc compared to any UK host. Whats really annoying is that they suspended my account on the 24th, fully realising they were going to be issues with customer service for the next few days considering it was christmas. Couldn't they wait till after christmas. I will just have to ask them to refund the 2nd payment. I am sure they will refund it.
As I said, they suspended my account on the basis that I hadn't paid (due to a billing error) even though it was already charged on my card. So, they sent me another email saying the account has been suspended. I tried to get in contact with them to their support, but no luck. The only way for me to get the sites going live agains as soon as possible was to click on the payment link and pay again. However, I will be sending them another message right now asking for a refund of the second payment.
Sounds like a sticky situation. If they're a good host, they should definitely say some thing in the lines of 'Sorry', and should fully refund you your second payment and maybe some of your first payment for the 'downtime' suspension they miss-issued on your account. If they do not have a good support department, then you should go with a host that is more reliable!
If this involves any serious loss of revenue, you can avoid situations like this in the future by having a colocated server and set up the nameserver for your domain to redirect to the IP of the colocated server. Regarding compensation for lost revenue you would have made - I doubt the hosting company would have contracts that say they are responsible. Many hosting companies have uptime guarantees, but the only compensation would be minimal. Regarding the admin errors - if the errors were theirs, they may compensate you according to their uptime guarantees. If they made some terribly lame errors which would be an embarrassment if word got out, they might make an offer to keep you silent. My hosting company switched over to different servers without telling me, failed to transfer about 70,000 files, and had no backups. I ended up losing hundreds of dollars of revenue, and it took me more than a week of work to upload all backup files via ftp. (If this ever happens again, I will burn them a DVD and get it to them, for much faster recovery). It would be very embarrassing if word got out, so they added two free months onto my contract expiration date. I love running my own name servers and web servers. I would do all my own hosting, but having 365x24 support is my personal preference, because it allows me to go out of town on business and vacation.
Any one here did not tell about which Hosting company. it would be helpful to improve the services. if the hosting provider belong to company i work for..........
Which company you work for maybe he can say hot or not hot , cause i dunno if op wants to tell name of company before he moves away from them to a better host. Cheers
Which doesn't always work. I've seen numerous "tries", yet the company that is in question is still in business getting more customers. If your hosting account is potentially compromising the performance of others, then there's no reason for them to consider looking the other direction hoping it'll just go away no matter what event is coming up. Good luck getting your issues resolved. Try to remain calm and polite (bunch of tall orders, I know), and provide specifics and "proof" to validate your claim.