I have a customer whose son used 14 GB disk space and about 30 GB of bandwidth more then he is allowed with video games, cracks, warez etc. What should I do? I charge a $50 cleanup charge and $1 per MB disk space and $6 per GB overage. How much should I charge them? Should I charge them all that or should I give them a break?

If it was normal things I would give them a break but I don’t know what to do if its copyrighted and illegal material. Please help me.

Thanks

If you give them a break, they're likely to do the same down the row. I'd explain to them the situation and that you can't just make the money to pay for that stuff come out of thin air. They somehow allowed their son access to it and that is no fault of yours. It's sad, but if you pass the bill to the account holder who's account used it, I'm sure they won't be giving away access to it again.

Well IMHO, you should set some set limits running to prevent that in the first place, mainly to protect yourself from a new customer signing up a cheap plan, pumping 300 gig worth of warez through it then sending you a chargeback.

If your AUP states clearly that that's what they owe then that's what it costs. Do you *know* that's what happened? What was he doing allowing his son access to his account anyway without checking to see what he was doing?

I'm all for cutting people a break here and there, but it looks like a mess from both sides. There's a point at which you can't wear the cost of other people mistakes (or intentional use).

Illegal material gets one response... deletion the moment it's found. Things like warez get an account shut down with no recourse. The whole situation smells fishy to me.

Greg Moore

:eek: $14566 :eek:
well someone is ****** for a very long time
you might want to work out a monthly plan, or drop half of it this time, but if it happens again charge double rate. Damn that is huge...

Originally posted by JustinK
If you give them a break, they're likely to do the same down the row. I'd explain to them the situation and that you can't just make the money to pay for that stuff come out of thin air. They somehow allowed their son access to it and that is no fault of yours. It's sad, but if you pass the bill to the account holder who's account used it, I'm sure they won't be giving away access to it again.

humm, yeah wouldn't you notice 14GB of data being uploaded to a single site as a little much, especialy if it if 14GB over (with a dedicated server I might be able to see, but a shared server that is huge)...

My opinion:

If you haven't cleaned the harddrive yet....do it as fast as you can.
I shouldn't charge them the full amount , because that's $14,230 which is maybe too much for them :).

What I think you should do is let them pay the extra bandwith of $180 and the $50 cleanup-charge + maybe a little fee for inconvenience. If they're going to complain about that......tell them they can also choose to pay $14,230 :D

I did set their limit but they used anonymous FTP to do all that so WHM didn’t notice, and neither did I and it all was done today. He used all that BW and DS in one day. What do you think I should charge them?

And he has 2 domains under his account one for him and one for his son.

WHM doesn't notice anonymous FTP?! I hope that got submitted as a bug. I'd say charge them what the little mishap cost you plus the $50 fine. Tell them if it happens again however, you will have to charge them the set price. Now I'm just being nice for this type of situation, other's may be boiling up the tar for you to use. :D Also, if possible, cut off their anonymous FTP access.

Disable Anon FTP.
Charge for your expenses (BW + Disk Space + Time)
Charge some fee for the TOS/AUP violtaions.
Maybe add on something per month for X months, where you check the files in that account to make sure they are legal.

Originally posted by Thejavaman1
Disable Anon FTP.Absolutely. You allow anonymous FTP and you are asking for trouble.

Charging them $1/MB for disk space is extortionate; even more so if the disk space was only used for a single day.

It is, however, only reasonable to charge for the bandwidth used; likewise for your time. And (of course) disable anonymous FTP -- I don't know why you would ever had enabled it in the first place given that it is entirely deprecated in favour of HTTP now.

Originally posted by one_web
I have a customer whose son used with video games, cracks, warez etc.

:eek:

I read all the replies and my pants dropped to the floor. Everybody talks about how to bill this customer.

Hello! This customer put illegal contents on the server. Videogames and other warez. Bill him? His site should have been disabled the minute you found out, the customer notified that he can kiss a refund goodbye and if he gets angry about this let him know how lucky he is that you didn't notify the authorities.

But I'm probably old fashioned...:confused:

I would charge him for the bandwidth plus a cleanup fee, but give him a break on the disk space this time.

If you charge for example $300 for the cleanup/your time, plus $6/GB for bandwidth, that makes a total of $480.

HI!
Don't you have a quota system....
I think that would help avoid such massive extracharges. No client would be $30 for hosting and $1500 for over usage.... So it is always good to avoid such a situation... : (

Have a great day:)

Regards
amar

Personally I'd be willing to accept a goodwill deposit with a fixed term... say about $250 for a year... After a year, if there's been no additional problems he gets the money back or credited to his account.

Drop the per MB charge but keep the rest...

That plus a written guarantee from the customer that it won't happen again or he will pay the charges (including the +MB charge)

Oh and his sons account is terminated... goodbye, ciao, look elsewhere sonny (oh and let us know the domain won't you so we can avoid your predicament) :)

Trouble is, he might be using RedHat 7.1 which has a problem with the disk quotas.

James

Yes thats it RedHat has a problem. But I got it fixed now. I have to keep on eye on it from now on. Well I cancelled the account. Talked with the kids mom and she said to cancel it but that she was going to call me after x-mas to see if we should give him the account back. She said that she will take away his keyboard till then. Now I feel bad for him but no one told him to give his password to his friends. They had a little video sharing thing going on with the account.

hi ya

How did you fix the quota issue?

James

Well my servers are over at BurstNet so I called and asked them to take a look at it and they said that they fixed the quota problem but that I had to keep on eye on it since it messes up sometimes.

Originally posted by one_web
Yes thats it RedHat has a problem. But I got it fixed now. I have to keep on eye on it from now on. Well I cancelled the account. Talked with the kids mom and she said to cancel it but that she was going to call me after x-mas to see if we should give him the account back. She said that she will take away his keyboard till then. Now I feel bad for him but no one told him to give his password to his friends. They had a little video sharing thing going on with the account.

Wait, so it was the kid's own account? :| Now see I thought it was the parent's business website or something and the kid had managed to get in and start up a pirating warehouse or something. I would have killed the account on the spot knowing it's the kid's and not allow the little *censored* back. He's too much of a risk. Why you feel sorry for him is beyond me. He cost you money and didn't have to pay for it. The story completely changed from that first post.

Originally posted by JustinK


Wait, so it was the kid's own account? :| Now see I thought it was the parent's business website or something and the kid had managed to get in and start up a pirating warehouse or something. I would have killed the account on the spot knowing it's the kid's and not allow the little *censored* back. He's too much of a risk. Why you feel sorry for him is beyond me. He cost you money and didn't have to pay for it. The story completely changed from that first post.

ohh, yeah, if it is his account he really should know better, even if he can't pay it all upfront he will have learned his lesson after paying almost 15k...

No, it is his fathers account, but he asked me to add another domain to his account so his son can have a small site. I said fine but that small site ended up being 14 GB of space. His son then went and gave his friends access to the account so that they can share all these files. His parent didn't find out until I told them today.

Here is what I think would be fair.
Charge for your expenses
Plus a security deposit of 1 year of hosting (like $30*12) that you will refund if there are no prolbems

however if your host (bust.net I *think* you said) checks their logs and notices this and does something about it, they owe the full ammout...

Yes my servers are at BurstNet. They really didn't do anything about it. They actually helped me out in putting an end to this and making sure it doesn't happen again. I will just charge them the bandwidth, cleanup fee, a little fee of the diskspace, and maybe something for the time.

Do what you feel. I'd say a couple hundred dollars (Probably 2 or 3 hundred) should be fine. :) It would make him learn his lesson.

-Kyle

*edit out. never mind*

Originally posted by Kylecool
I'd charge them 10k. You have proof, show them the logs, screenshots, everything.

Kyle, that is called extortion. It's illegal. Don't do it.

It is? In that case, never mind. I edited the post. Thanks for the info. :)

-Kyle

So how much would be fine? $1000? $600? $400? ???

Originally posted by one_web
So how much would be fine? $1000? $600? $400? ???

IANAL, but from what knowledge I have, I'd say that you should:
1. Ignore the question of legality of content, except when considering if you should cancel the account for AUP violation, and
2. Charge a fee in reasonable proportion to your costs. This was my point about the $1/MB fee you spoke of above: The disk space doesn't cost you anything remotely near that much, so charging that rate would constitute price gouging.

Personally I'd say somewhere in the $400-600 range: $180 for the bandwidth (30GB @ $6/GB), $20 for the disk space (since they did only use it for a single day), and $200-$400 for the time it has taken you to clean this mess up.

Yea, that seems fair to me too. Around 500 should be ok. Your time is valuable. :)

-Kyle

Originally posted by cperciva


Kyle, that is called extortion. It's illegal. Don't do it.
Tell that to *****, when I had an account with them they would charge me $1500 every other week for "exceeding the unlimited bandwidth" :eek: or other bs.

Originally posted by mindboggle

Tell that to *****, when I had an account with them they would charge me $1500 every other week for "exceeding the unlimited bandwidth" :eek: or other bs.

*That* is price gouging (or rather, might be depending upon how much bandwidth you were using). Also illegal, but much harder to prove.

Extortion is where you take money in exchange for silence -- typically about the other party doing something illegal (warez in this case).

What I meant was charge them the full amount that you can that's in your TOS. That way, they will learn. Of Course, you will report it to the suthorities too. I guess like 500 would do though...

-Kyle