sentinel41

I'll continue this in PM's, but what you are saying, and what was sent to me, are 2 very different things.

sentinel41

In the hopes of preventing the problems for others in the future, I would propose the following suggestions.

1) Make sure that your current billing system does not suffer the same problems your last one did.

2) Audit your billing system more often then once every 3 years.

3) Trying to charge late fees on your own billing errors is a mistake.

4) Make sure that your legal team reviews any templates you use for emails or letters to make sure there aren't any major mistakes that leave people under a false understanding. The legal equivalent of misrepresentation is fraud, and that's something no company wants to be known for.

5) Billing should stop once the account goes into default, no exceptions. There shouldn't be a 2-3 year time lag, as you let the charges compile. If people aren't paying for a service, few expect it to continue to charge, and have led to many of the complaints I've seen of your service from other users.

6) This suggestion doesn't apply to me, but I believe this is important. Make the option to auto-renew your services off by default. Make sure where you offer the option, that it is clear what the option entails, and that you can specify it for each individual package.

People don't want to feel like they have been scammed. Taking a few, simple, but very important steps can help prevent a good 30% of the reason why 1/2 of the off site reviews for this host are unfavorable.

Sentinel

I don't know your particular situation other than what I read here but I would say that I agree with all your numbers above in general except for 2 things.

I really agree with #6 above. I wish that Surpass had an option to pay your bills on your own with no auto renew. I hate auto renew. I am one of those rare dieing bread of people that is actually capable of paying my bills on time on my own and I wish that I had the option of being able to do that. I think auto renew or auto debit can create more headaches then it appears to fix.

I would add to your numbers above:
#7 - People should check their own bills every month (especially if you have any auto debit/renew accounts any where!) to make sure that things that you are being billed for are correct and to make sure that you are being billed for something that you should be billed for.

Had you kept track of your own finances you would have seen that Surpass was not charging you for a service that you were still getting. That should have been a red flag to you when you should have seen a charge from Surpass and it was not there yet your website was still up.

If you had a car payment auto deducted from your account and all of a sudden you noticed you had a couple of extra hundred dollars every month and the car company was not deducting your payment, would you think they just decided to let you have the car for free? Do you think that a court would say that "I had no idea what was going on with my account" was a justifiable defense?

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SH100 , SH131 & SH124

javaqueen

Interesting. I had exactly the same thing happen to me a while back. I too have many autopayments going to a credit card and since nobody bothered to email to say that my account was overdue and wasn't being charged to my credit card, I assumed that eveything was going well. I had been running ok - because I had checked payments in the early days but stopped after a while because it was running soothly.

Then out of the blue - whammo - email to say the account is going to be deleted. Several emails later - with them saying overdue notices were sent to my email address and me saying I didn't get them (which I didn't) - I paid the outstanding amount. At the time it was money I had been setting aside for Christmas so that was a pain.

I've generally been reasonably happy with the Surpass service but the point of this post is to say that they do make accounting mistakes. Buyer beware and don't assume it is running smoothly - check those statements or you'll end up with a big bill like I did and it's not always convientent to have to find a LARGE sum at a moments notice.

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Pass3
www.beadit.co.nz
'Most Concise' Surpasser 2004

sentinel41

I think you might be confused. I'm not saying I'm not planing on paying the fee. I'm am however not going to pay for the late fees and the time after the posted hosting package cancellation date. I'm not making this fuss because I think I'm going to somehow end up not paying the fees, I'm making this fuss because I'm really upset with the service and I believe that other people might have been through the same thing. This is a forum for posting our experience with the hosting company, so that for better or worse, other people know what to expect. I would also hope that they pay strict attention to my last post as I believe those changes are very important.

Kayla

You do not have a "posted hosting package cancellation date." I explained to you before what the email you read means. It doesn't mean anything else. I can't really explain it further.

You have bandwidth usage (account usage) from 8/04 to 8/07 and that is how much is owed on the account.

From the ticket last year where you stopped replying to us.

No reply from you.

We sent more emails after that. No reply.

Did not hear from you again until now after collections was involved.

This reply was added to this same ticket last night:

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richaro

I had the same thing happen to me. I hosted several accounts through Surpass since at least 2003. Of my five domains hosted, Surpass erred in billing two of them and then, three years later, sent me a massive bill for hundreds of dollars. During this time, they never sent me any indication that the bill wasn't being paid or gave me any reason to suspect there was a problem. Because Surpass' system does not allow one to merge multiple accounts into one payment (this might be different now, but my accounts are all separate), it made it difficult to keep track of payments. And this isn't like a car payment where you would notice an excess of hundreds of dollars in your account - my payment plan for these domains was less than $5 a month, a neglibile amount.

I was able to resolve the issue with Surpass in a satisfactory manner. They agreed to reduce the amount due by half. The response was fair, in my eyes.

I only wish they would apply the same diligence they did to collecting on the money I owed to this most recent server outage in which my domains have been down for more than 8 hours.

DewKnight

From what I know about that issue you had, the old billing system had problems, the new one is awesome and shouldn't have crazy problems like that.

Surpass is honoring their SLA. Just open a ticket and they'll probably credit your account for the downtime.

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dad

reading through this.. I for one dont have auto renew billing as i have a better understanding of my bills that way. I requested such because depending on my paypal balance i have a choice on the payment . Surpass does have an active CC number though which they could use in case of me being in default.

some years ago my gf at the time had the bank where her car loan merged with another bank. She kept depositing the money faithfully in the bank account each month and about a year later she realized about $4000 was in that account. She kept depositing for a few months and then she needed some money for something and withdrew it. A few months later.. the bank came calling after an internal audit and wanted their money. As she didnt have it, They came to an agreement to pay without her credit score being affected.
1.She knew she was obligated to pay
2. The bank realized that in part it was their error(they had several loans,mortgages that hadnt been transferred properly)
3. The Bank gave a fair and equitable solution to resolve the matter for both(much of what i have seen Surpass do here)

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