sentinel41

I don't even know where to start. I signed up with them for my small business. They hosted my business page and a few personal pages, plus all my web design files for my other job. I was getting emails from them monthly with the invoices from the service. I checked my email often to make sure that all my paperless billing was being processed correctly, as I had countless services auto-billing my card every month. I had no problems with any other companies.

So, my card was due to expire years into my service. I contacted all the different companies that I had setup to auto-bill to move them over to the new card information. A few days went by after I mentioned to them that I needed to update the billing information. They replied to me saying that the service was canceled over a year ago, and that they are locking the account until I pay 700$ + late fees (now up to 900+ dollars) to unlock the account. Needless to say I was confused.

During this time I received no notices from them notifying me of the late payments, and in their own contact they state that if you default on a month the will suspend service and payments until you are paid up. They not only did not notify me that I was not being billed, but did not suspend the service. Now they are trying to charge me gross late fees on their mistake. I would like to mention again, the entire time still sending me emails implying I've been billed.

To make matters worse, I'd been using their support center on and off for years from all the hosting problems. During this time they failed to mention anything of the billing issue. Now all of the files hosted on the site were removed and I had to remake several of them from scratch. They seem to have done this with many other people as well. I for one am going to fight the collection, I'm contacting my lawyer and I will also bring this up with the BBB as well.

DON'T USE SurpassHosting! It would be more fitting to call them a scam rather then a legitimate company. I've found accounts on other sites now of many other people who have had the same problems that I've had. I urge anyone else who has a similar experience to mine to post it and fight the charges.

You can't back-charge people for a service that would of otherwise been disconnected as a result of your billing departments complete incompetence. The cherry on top, the hosting was awful, the site was constantly down, speeds were at a crawl at points. One more time for good measure,
DON'T USE SurpassHosting!

Kayla

Hi Sentinel,

This forum is actually for escalating any issues that you do not feel are being handled to your satisfaction. We can work with you to lower the payment.

But also did you not realize that you were not paying us during this time yet were using the services? I know that there was a mistake on our end but I do feel that accounting is working hard to sort out loose ends they are finding and we need cooperation to get everything straight.

Please PM me so that we can work on solving this.

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sentinel41

As far as I knew everything was being billed. I'm contacting my last credit card company now. I'll send you a PM in the hopes of working something out. I'll continue to update this thread (for better or worse) with my experience until the conclusion of the matter. To serve as a guide post for anyone else that might be in my situation.

Kayla

PM sent back to better understand the situation.

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Sentinel

On your side:
Definitely if a company doesn't collect money from you for a servide for a year and then realizes it they should not bill for a year of late fees. If you don't pay your bills they should cut you off and if they didn't then shame on them and they should not charge you late fees.

On their side:
Are you one of those people that has "auto deduct" everything and checks nothing? You cannot just let everything auto deduct and *hope* that everything goes OK. It is your responsibility to make sure that everything goes right. Had you checked your statement would have seen that you had more money in your account then you should have.

Second you say that you use their service for years and had terrible service ... then why did you use their service for years? Why would an intelligent person continue to use a company that gives them such bad service for years? If Surpass gave me bad service I would leave in about a month.

Third, you say that they removed everything off of your site and you lost stuff ... You don't back stuff up? I have everything from my website backed up on my personal computer here at home. It is nice that Surpass backs up my site but I don't trust ANY company with my stuff. My entire website could go belly up and I could right back in a few minutes with another company with my back ups. Any one that has had any time with computers knows that.

Fourth, you say they are a scam ... with so many happy customers? A scam implies that they do not provide the service that they imply that they are selling. A scam means that they have no intention of selling hosting but are rather going to get your money and give you nothing. Yet you state that they gave you service for years. Hundreds of others here get service for years also. Scam is a bit over the top don't you think?

And again, you state that you used their service for years. So ... you were scammed for years? Why did you keep sending them money if they were not giving you any service?

Bottom line is that reviews like this on a companies site show more about the poster than the company he is complaining about. When I read reviews like this I always ignored them. They are obviously an attempt by a disgruntled customer to get some satisfaction for a perceived wrong doing. Possibly justified but so over the top and unrealistic that they make the company look better than before.

One last thing. You say you read numerous complaints just like yours on the internet ... links please?

Bottom line ... auto deduct from a bank account is the devil. It makes you think your life is going to be easier and all it does is make life much more difficult for you to keep track of. It lulls you into a false sense of care freeness that makes you think that you no longer have ot worry about your bills. And then whamo! You find out that your bank has not been taking care of your bills.

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SH100 , SH131 & SH124

Kayla

The late fee is only $10 but it is most often waived. In this case there shouldn't have actually been a late fee considering the time frame; our accounting division has been notified of that.

We are still satisfactorily discussing the issue in private messages.

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Sentinel

Oh well if the late fee is only $10 then ... that's nothing. He implies that they late fees exceed $200 or $300. That would be wrong.

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SH100 , SH131 & SH124

sentinel41

There is a little more too it then that, I'll post the details once everything is concluded. I've said that I'm willing to pay up till their posted cancellation date.

The links that you were asking for:
SurpassHosting Reviews - Read SurpassHosting Web Hosting Reviews at WebHostingTestimonials.com
There's more if you keep searching. BBB has a few, and there are a few other forums. I don't know how long you've had hosting through them, but blindly defending them won't help the situation. I'm not the only person that has been put into this position as a result their billing department. I've been reassured that their current system in place prevents this from happening. But I signed up in 03?, and the following 4 years was a train wreck. I can only hope that things have improved, because there is no way I could recommend their prior service to any clients.

I do web design now, but before I opened my small business, I helped design internal networks for datacenters and colo's. I worked a lot with clusters, bgp, balance loading OC's, routing for large scale networks. Setting up servers that would ping incoming and outgoing traffic and instantly migrate it to the lowest latency connection, while balancing the traffic across multiple backbones, many times a second. I know a lot about uptime and I know a lot about managing server and backbone loads to predict and prevent slowdown from spikes in service during peak times. I'm not a novice when it comes to matters of service quality in the shared and dedicated hosting world.

I was never overly critical of the constant problems with the host. I'm usually a pretty laid back person. The billing issues was just the straw that severed the camel in 2. Hell, most of the time I didn't even bother with the site when it was down or had a problem, I just sent one of the high school students I had working for me to poke around with it to try and get it working. The problem I have is mostly billing, and if I can resolve that, I'll be going back to my otherwise uneventful day.

However, I do not plan to pay for anything after the cancellation date they sent to me, nor will I pay for any of the late fees. I have no intention of letting them charge me a penny more then I'm legally obligated to pay. I'm more then willing to take it to court, it will most likely end up in small claims, but at least I can give this damn pre-paid legal service something to do with the money I'm paying them each year. I'm normally not such a pr*ck about this stuff (mostly because I'm fairly apathetic), but I was having a nice dream when the collection agency called this morning.

Kayla

Like the testimonial you posted, you are also unfortunately understanding the email as they were.

The order/payment number being canceled in no way means that your account itself was canceled. They are two different things. If you are still using an account and not paying for it, the payment is still owed.

When that person in the testimonial stated,
"It" (the email they quote) certainly doesn't mean they canceled it with us. It just means their payment failed and it no longer could be billed.

We talked to you about the situation in August and you stopped replying. Another notice was sent in October. We didn't hear from you again until now.

There were admittedly mistakes on our end and yours - all of which gets us to the point where we are now. I would appreciate resolving this in private messages like we were previously. Thank you.

(We never want to deal with collections agencies (who would) but if no one responds it's hard to do anything else.)

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