| Posted by perholmes, 04-18-2016, 07:02 AM | |
Hi,
Once again, it's one of those times where you wonder what the f**k you're doing hosting with VPS.net.
So get this. It used to be free to use an SSL with their CDN. Apparently today, this service now costs $30/year, and then way I know is that I received an account suspension for an unpaid invoice that must be paid within 48 hours, or our entire web profile including servers and multiple CDNs will be deleted.
So they invented a new charge, and then threatened death and damnation if it isn't paid within 48 hours. This is dangerous for me, because I often travel for very demanding work where I won't be on the internet for days. Through no fault of my own, it would be possible to come back from work and find everything having been deleted.
Shame on VPS.net.
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| Posted by perholmes, 04-18-2016, 07:04 AM | |
And it's even more sickening. I could pay the invoice immediately with the credit card ON FILE.
This is completely irresponsible of VPS.net
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| Posted by Mike_A, 04-18-2016, 07:30 AM | |
Sounds like a case of "We TRULY value our loyal customers!... with data deletion."
48 hours is a short time frame mostly for the prices they charge. Generally even low end providers give at least 5-10 days before actually deleting data without payment.
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| Posted by perholmes, 04-18-2016, 07:38 AM | |
What I think is egregious is that this is on a new service charge that used to be free. There has been no warning, it was just added to the account with the highest overdue status. Whether or not they delete data is not it -- presumably, they don't *actually* delete the data. But they'd still start taking the website of an innocent customer offline, and I may not always be able to respond in 48 hours. You can be long enough in transit while traveling to exceed that, and even if I can receive the message, I might not be able to get on secure internet where I can actually log in and handle it.
So basically, this is VPS out of the blue pulling a gun on a customer, setting a timer that the customer can't meet, and then firing. We spend a lot of money with VPS.net, and I think this is disgusting.
I've had enough bad experienced with VPS.net that our site is entirely abstracted out. We could change hosts in 1-2 full days now, possibly faster, although it's an interruption for our users, and there will inevitably be bugs in the transition. But I've learned the hard way to become host independent. This event reinforces that like crazy.
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| Posted by MightWeb-Marcus, 04-18-2016, 07:40 AM | |
The fact that they'd invent such a charge alone is odd - are you sure you haven't received any prior notification from them? Might be sorted in a SPAM folder or something - but it's worth checking out.
Either way, 48 hours is a ridicilously short amount of time before proceeding to actually DELETE information. As Mike mentioned - even low-end providers usually give roughly 10 days before termination - with a whole lot of providers keeping it for 30 days (but suspending much earlier, of course).
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| Posted by Savio13, 04-18-2016, 07:41 AM | |
48 hours is quite a short amount of time indeed, perhaps all part of they strategy
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| Posted by perholmes, 04-18-2016, 07:51 AM | |
Hi,
Our email is monitored very carefully. We only have one spam folder for the entire domain, and I check it once per week one email at a time. There has not been any notification, I can say with certainty.
The new charge is for adding an SSL certificate to a CDN, where they resell MaxCDN. This was free, apparently until today. I don't mind the charge, I'm sure that managing a CDN is harder when people bring their own SSL certs, and we do need that serving static content on SSL pages on our site. Amazon charges much more for the same thing.
The problem is the lack of warning, and then the instant thermonuclear escalation.
Interestingly, the invoice is dated today. So it went straight into severely overdue the moment it was generated.
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| Posted by perholmes, 04-18-2016, 08:00 AM | |
Nope, I'm wrong. Doing some digging, we did receive the invoice 10 days ago, and someone moved it into accounting -- we receive a lot of VPS.net invoices, and their destination is the accountant's folder. Even better, I can see that we've paid this service one year before, so it was further back that it was free. But clearly, this is not a new charge.
I don't understand why it's not auto-charging, though. It had to be enabled on the account, but this is something I enable religiously whenever going through any site-related billing. It's incredibly unlikely that this wasn't enabled on creation, because business-survival depends entirely on cards charging automatically. It's one of the things that keeps me up a night what happens to the company if something happens to me.
In case, it appears that this is not VPS.net's fault, except if their site somehow disabled auto-billing.
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| Posted by perholmes, 04-18-2016, 08:05 AM | |
I can't find any record regarding auto-billing, but it's entirely possible that this is then user-error on my part. I say that because I've felt sure before and been objectively wrong. Sometimes you lose a checkbox on page-reload for example.
But I'm going to do an auto-bill check on every service we subscribe to everywhere. This could have been really dangerous. It appears that the probability that this particular incident is VPS.net's fault is low.
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| Posted by perholmes, 04-18-2016, 08:18 AM | |
Now that it's clear what has happened, the one thing that I object to in VPS.net's handling is the lack of granularity in escalation.
Step 1: Invoice is generated with 10 day due date. Email has payment instructions, but we assume that it will auto-bill like every other UK2Group service we have.
Step 2: Ten days later, a 24 hour warning of account deletion (not 48 hours as stated above).
If you respect your customers, there has to be a step between those two. We've spent a LOT of money in the last 10 years with Uk2Group (VPS.net/MidPhase/100TB/WestHost/MaXCDN). When you have a billing cycle that doesn't allow for any errors, with the severest of consequences, you realize how little you matter to them. They assume that we're the same as some scumbag jumping from server to server to spam.
This billing cycle scares me, because it does not allow for any clerical or transmission errors. So even with a good faith effort, this guillotine can still suddenly come down.
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