A few months back I had taken up a FREE starter cloud hosting from NZCLOUDHOSTING.COM, who had advertised free started accounts in this DP thread of the freebies section, only because I wanted to try how cloud hosting is like. Now how can I get scammed if I took up free hosting you would ask? Well there's an interesting modus operandi done by the owner of the company. A couple of months into the service, I saw "service suspended" message instead of the website I had hosted with these people. When I emailed to enquire why this happened, I got a reply almost 24 hours later (their support is extremely slow too) that my website had overused resources and that I needed to upgrade to a better plan if my website would be needing more bandwidth. The funny thing is that my site was a newly built, wordpress based portfolio website, and barely getting any traffic, so over usage of resources was out of question. However, I naively thought at that time that someone was doing a ddos attack on my website. In any case, I asked the support rep to give me a backup of my website and I would just shift to another server. He REFUSED to give a backup unless I paid $10 - a fine for over-usage of resources! It was literally a type of blackmail. Even though I found the claim atrocious, I agreed to make the payment because I did not have the energy to rebuild a site from scratch (and this is a lesson - download regular backups!). Once I made the payment, I emailed their support with a payment transaction id and asked for a full backup of my site. After more than 24 hours, I was send a mysql backup of my site. I sent another email telling them i needed a full backup and not an sql one..this time I got a reply after almost 48 hours...by the time I had almost lost hope. Relieved with it, I restored the backup on the reseller hosting I use to host my other websites. I decided not to make an issue of a paltry sum of $10...until the following happened: 15 days later (approx) I got an email from the payment gateway provider of the above hosting service, that the money I paid was going to be refunded to me, "because it did not pass a series of fraud checks". Immediately after that there was an email from the administrator of NZ cloud hosting, which was this: Now not only was this guy asking the wrong person (he should have asked this to the gateway provider), he was also making a stupid threat. When I logged in to my twitter account a few minutes later, I found a couple of tweets from this company asking me to pay $10! I was astounded by the level of stalking...they did not even wait for me to reply. I decided to ignore mails from nz cloud hosting...which kept coming..including with threats like "Should I tell your family?". Shit hit the ceiling when he started posting on my dp profile page and PMing at the same time. ALL THIS FOR $10...THAT YOU WERE ANYWAY EXTRACTING WITH BLACKMAIL. REALLY? I have been a long time respected DP member, and I have never gone through the shitty experience of this magnitude before. $10 is peanuts for me, but paying it as blackmail or extortion is unacceptable. And STALKING is way more unacceptable. I hope no members go through this kind of experience.
Hi Sarthak Thanks for the nice, yet interesting post about us. We didn't stalk you, you didnt reply to emails for over 2 months. We contacted you via your WHOIS details and via a simple google lookup - of your email address. International Debt collection agency's contact the debtor's families all the time to get in contact with the person, I have had several people ring for my family to get in contact with me. It was only to gain contact and find out whats going on - No intention at all of " E-STALKING " - We simply had absolutely NO CONTACT at all. We were on the point of writing the debt off until you finally replied. You could have simply replied to us in the first instance saying you no nothing about the chargeback, yet you have responded in such a negative manner - Both the payment gateway, our fraud investigator and our staff believe it is indeed a chargeback due to the nature of the response from you Sarthak. But wait, theres more. Not so negative stuff. During our signup there is a TOS agreement, you have to agree to these terms and conditions during signup. Within the TOS is basically a term, stating that if you were to crash the server or system via a ddos, script or otherwise - We MAY charge you UP TO $100. We charged you $10, and if you stayed well i was going to upgrade your account and put you onto a bigger server - Basically a paid hosting plan, however I didn't tell you i had those intentions - Maybe I should have? So, since you have kicked up such a childish stink - We have cancelled the $10 fee, and cancelled debt collection. Please do take note, if you have an account on premium hosting - and you dont read the terms & conditions and you crash a vm and get a little $10 fee and complain about being scammed - Dont go around screaming, Because ive just explained we have fees for accounts that crash servers, and your complaining that you've been scammed... So far ive got more than 10 clients out of several thousand, that have crashed a VM - even after emergency resource limits were enforced - We charged them over $10 and they are still with us, 3 years later. Happy now Sarthak? I am, because now the public can see the other side of the story. Oh, and Sarthak believes we threatened his website(s). All we said was " Good luck with your website(s) " - Like saying, hey we are over this rubbish, get on with developing your site - we have business and work to do rather than waste time... So, Sarthak, i would just like to say safely here - Good luck with your future web developments and I hope you dont run into any further hosting issues and if you want to come back to NZCLOUDHOSTING there is a $25 credit sitting there waiting for you. Best Regards, NZCLOUDHOSTING Joshua - CEO
You contacted me by searching for my WHOIS details? What a joke...You always had me email address with which I signed up for an account and also contacted you loads of times. Also, 2 months..really? It was only June 18, 2012 that I got your email about payment declined....you're lying through your teeth here. Funny thing is you threatened me about international debt collection in the very first email, and at the same time trolled me on twitter. Thats when I decided to ignore you till the stalking became alarming. Do you really think people shit in their pants when you threaten them with international debt collection for $10? And what exactly are you saying...you kept trolling me and threatening me with debt collection..but in the end you planned to write my 'debt' off? Please make up your mind.. You troll me, threaten me and then expect a positive response? I've asked you for proof that I did a chargeback countless times and you havent been able to furnish it yet. Dont tell me your "payment gateway" and "fraud investigator" beleive its a chargeback. Who's your fraud investigator by the way? FBI? I told you I 'suspected' my site may have been a victim of a ddos attack when you claimed it crashed your server, because there was no way a new wordpress based protfolio site could have overused resources. But I was naive, and couldn't see through your plan. gee thanks...