Cancellation Requests

LampNetworks

LampNetworks

New member
What percentage of your 'former' shared hosting clients used your cancellation form as notification?

For us, the percentage is extremely low, under 1%. Typically, clients who no longer need their hosting account tend to just stop paying rather than cancelling. We also find that however much you reach out to the client to resolve an issue, or request they use the cancellation form if their intention is not to renew, is usually ignored. Even those who have moved on and updated their DNS records are also struck down with this ignorance bug too.

We do not get many cancellations but when we do without notification the problem for us is the amount of backup space used by these 'non' accounts on the backup servers. For example, a shared plan with 10GB used has 80GB space on backup servers (7 daily and 1 weekly) that is only removed upon account termination as per ToS. A cancellation request would allow us to terminate without delay.

How long do you keep client account backups after a client has failed to pay?

What are your polices regarding cancellation of a shared hosting account?
 
yes we get very few cancellations and those that we do have the same thing wrong in that they cant use cancellation forms. if they dont pay and the account goes suspended we leave this to auto terminate, but still leave the invoice active as in effect until termination their files were taking up server space and backup server space. We usually then send an LBA, if this is ignored then we dont take further as no point due to costs, although we did take it all the way to a CCJ with one client who become abusive because we terminated his account, so the money he owed approx. £30 turned into a £265 bill with all the small claim costs and other fees, which he paid 1 day before the courts were going to appoint bailiffs
 
We have a large number of cancellations that do not go through the proper measures. Really I think most consider it the "norm" to just leave it to expire as the majority will follow the same process: Suspend it after x days, terminate it after x days and that be the end of it.

Though we do get our fair share of cancellations that go through the proper cancellation procedure (thankfully).
 
Hmm. I would say about 50% of our cancellations are on the cancellation form. The rest, the autocancel/terminate takes care of it.
 
LampNetworks said:
What percentage of your 'former' shared hosting clients used your cancellation form as notification?

For us, the percentage is extremely low, under 1%. Typically, clients who no longer need their hosting account tend to just stop paying rather than cancelling.
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All of the cancellation requests we have received to date (not very many) have been through the cancellation form.
 
I would say 90% of people who leave just stop paying.

However, once suspended, we don't back them up anymore as nothing has changed, so that's not an issue for us. Once they've been terminated they disappear from the retention policy eventually.

We take it as a part of hosting life.
 
All of the cancellation requests we have received to date (not very many) have been through the cancellation form.
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That said, I suppose I should add that we haven't received any cancellation requests from paying clients yet... I was going to say it's a bit bizarre to receive cancellation requests from free hosting clients, but, on second thought, I suppose I'm glad that they've been respectful enough to let us know they're no longer using the account!
 
@OP Really as you can see this is just the nature of web hosting. If you are at the point where you feel you are not in a position to justify the costs of these backups then may be it is time to revisit your backup plan or your package quota to something more reasonable.

Backups is just one of those expenses in a normal web hosting providers business that you just have to live with :).
 
@ughosting we have learned to stay away from hosts who hold backups hostage as you've described. Reminds me of a joke I came across a few hours ago:
A biologist, a chemist, and a statistician are out hunting. The biologist shoots at a deer and misses five feet to the left. The chemist takes a shot and misses five feet to the right. The statistician yells "We got 'em!”
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I once witnessed an inept provider suspend every account on a server because only 1 or 2 accounts had been in violation of his ToS. He gave no warning, i.e. the people effected were not aware of the violations until he inexplicably and negligently decided to punish everyone over them in a single clumsy brush stroke. He did as you've described, suspended everything and refused to provide backups after giving an inadequate amount of time, considering the circumstances, for the accounts to be migrated to a different server. It was a very pitiful display on the whole. The behaviour is typical of dull, callous technocrats who seem to have lost the ability to envision the people they're dealing with as something other than a blip on the screen.

I don't know you and I'm not trying to compare you or your company to this person's failure to grasp the concept of 'common courtesy', your post triggered the memory is all. I have no idea whether the suspensions you've dished out were 'deserved' rather than ignorant acts of arrogation. I guess what I mean to say is that a draconian suspension policy is not always the best idea. :disagree:

LampNetworks said:
How long do you keep client account backups after a client has failed to pay?

What are your polices regarding cancellation of a shared hosting account?
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I sincerely think a lot of web hosts would find themselves losing less clients if they were to stop treating 'infractions' like a 'game over' screen in a video game and remember that there is a person on the other side, tbqh... it all depends on context, though!
 
We make the client submit the cancellation request via our client area.

The main reason is to verify some type of credential. We've received some "cancellation" notices in the past from servers who should not have originated the messages.

In this case, the user would need the password. So it's just a way to be absolutely sure that the request comes from the actual user.
 
media-hosts_com said:
We make the client submit the cancellation request via our client area.

The main reason is to verify some type of credential. We've received some "cancellation" notices in the past from servers who should not have originated the messages.

In this case, the user would need the password. So it's just a way to be absolutely sure that the request comes from the actual user.
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I believe this thread is more for commenting on what to do when clients suddenly stop paying as a form of "cancelling". In a perfect world every client would fill in the cancellation form as above :).
 
Fact of the matter is that many times people just can't be bothered to perform an extra action if they don't have a direct benefit from it. And many times they just choose to disregard any procedure for a cancellation different than clicking a big "Cancel" button. And that happens a lot even with hosts that have an autorenewal policy and a cancellation is needed in order to stop that. Just the common psychology in the online world, as simple as that.

With my previous experience with various hosts the number of proper cancellations surely did not exceed the 40-50% mark. More people will learn but many websites will fall in battle during this enlightenment :rolleyes2
 
LampNetworks said:
What is your policy for clients' that do not submit a cancellation request and just stop paying?
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Standard policy in that case would be to suspend the VPS after the invoice is overdue for 3 days, and then if no communication is received by the client within 30 days of that date, we send out a notice that the account will be deleted within 24 hours. Usually if the person really wants to keep their account they will reply at that stage. Even then we still keep the data for a while longer just in-case. Eventually it is deleted.
 
I think most people leaving without cancellation request. They just stop the paying. We keep client account for 7 days if they want to renew.
 
@ughosting we have learned to stay away from hosts who hold backups hostage as you've described. Reminds me of a joke I came across a few hours ago:
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@Sister, I never said we hold backups hostage. What I said was, once your account is suspended, it does not (read as cannot) change, so no further backups are necessary.

Be careful what you accuse people of. Respect, once lost, is difficult to regain, from customers or peers.

From a business point of view however, why should a host hand over backups for an account no longer paid for?
Especially if the customer has had the tools to make their own backups all the time they were in contract?

I'm not saying we wouldn't, don't hear what I haven't said.
 
It is the clients responsibility to make their own backups. As a host we make daily backups for our own purposes in case of hardware failure etc. Our clients at the time of ordering has a choice to pay a £2 monthly fee to have the right to request a copy of these as long as they pay, if a client does not take this option and wants a copy of a backup we will charge them a one off £15, so if a client is suspended/terminated for non payment then they have not paid, so have no right to a copy of a backup we have taken. We even use the cPanel news section to place a note in all cPanels stating it is the clients responsibility to make backups.
 
We have thought about charging in this manner for backups, however, our TOS states.

The backups taken are in case of system failure, but as a courtesy to paying customers we may restore an account from a recent backup, but if this is a frequent occurrence, we may decide to charge an administration fee
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To my knowledge we've never charged a fee yet, but it's there just in case, so we can invoke it if we feel we are being taken advantage of.
 
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