Issuing Refunds to Accounts Terminated for Abuse

SenseiSteve

HD Moderator
Staff member
Read a thread elsewhere where the OP was complaining about being denied a refund after their account was terminated for abuse. I'm simply curious how other web hosting providers would react to a request for a refund given this circumstance?
 
Read a thread elsewhere where the OP was complaining about being denied a refund after their account was terminated for abuse. I'm simply curious how other web hosting providers would react to a request for a refund given this circumstance?
Terms of Service should have this particular incident clearly outlined.

For us, we terminated and did not issue a refund, but quoted our TOS in a response/notice to the client.

I did have some incidents where we terminated the relationship due to abuse of staff in which I issued a partial or full refund and provided the ZIP files for their site. But those were very isolated cases.

The TOS should cover nearly every possible scenario, and incidents of abuse should be documented and saved should there be any litigation or disputes with legal teams or credit card companies.
 
Agreed. It's a sad reality that the vast majority of small hosting providers don't dedicate nearly enough time or attention to getting their TOS right.
yes, some I see are just basic copied TOS with little details, and have even seen TOS where they have not even bothered to change the name of where they copied them from.

I asked one of my M8s who was a manager of the local trading standards office (UK) about a point i wanted to add to my TOS, he asked me to send him a full copy of my TOS and he would have one of the staff to go through it.
When it come back it was like me having to do a full rewrite as the number of bits they removed, bits added, and bits changed, but I knew it complied with current legislation.

But going back to the original question.

If i terminated an account for abuse, they got no refund, no matter what terms they had, so if they paid 12 mths and abused after a couple of weeks then tough, no refund, they should not have abused the server.

Regarding site files, this depends on the content, if just a normal website then I would give them 7 days to contact me regarding getting a copy of their files. if the site had abusive content, the files would be removed without them getting a copy
 
We provide no refunds to customers that have received abuse reports or have uploaded malicious content on our servers. We also do not provide them with any backups of the files if the abuse was related to phishing or scam. It's stated in our Terms under what conditions we offer refunds. We don't encourage such activities :)
 
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