Well, I'm miffed.

Here's my tale:

At the beginning of September, I signed up two accounts with http://www.cedant.com/ after reading many positive reviews for them in various Host review sites. (This is before I found this BB and realized how skewed many of the review sites are... sigh). I prepaid for 6 month accounts on my credit card.

At the end of October, I decided to move both accounts from Cedant to another host as I realized that the space limitations Cedant had (plus bandwidth) were too small for what I required. Before cancelling, I e-mailed support to confirm that I would receive a full refund for the time I had not used - I didn't want to get caught in the position of cancelling and then finding out that no refunds were available!

I received an email back within a couple of hours letting me know that yes, I would receive a full refund for the 4 months I had not used.

I should note here that response times for e-mail inquiries have always been within 24 hours. This speedy support service was one of the reasons I chose Cedant in the first place.

So, I made preparations and cancelled both of my accounts. I then e-mailed both the support and billing emails, telling them to cancel the accounts and to credit my CC for the discussed amount.

After four days, a credit appeared on my CC - but it was NOT for the amount expected. It was only half, basically, of the credit I was owed.

I have now sent them 6 e-mails to both the support and billing addresses asking when the remainder owed will be reimbursed , with absolutely NO reply whatsoever.

Frankly, I'm surprised as I've come to expect Cedant's service to be quite good - but not replying AT ALL to a customer's requests - even to say, "We've received your e-mail and are looking into the problem" is terrible.

I'm still owed this money, and because I'm located in Canada (and they in the US), I don't believe I have any legal or consumer recourse to get this money back.

Folks (and hosts, if you're reading) - this qualifies as TERRIBLE service, in my book. I can understand if a small business owner is very busy... and can understand that billing issues make take some time to rectify... but by not replying at all to repeated requests for information after establishing that your company DOES provide quick service is very, very suspect. This is exacerbated by the fact that this is a post-cancellation billing issue and not a support one.

Any good things I have said about Cedant in the past are hereby revoked, pending clarification or response from the company.

Neil

Just curious not to take their side, but why would you email technical support about a billing question???

actually, he mailed tech support and billing (most likely to get an answer)
"... I have now sent them 6 e-mails to both the support and billing addresses ..."

But the first time he emailed only support that is where he got a answer that he would be refunded, it was only after he found out that he only got half of his refund that he emailed both 6x, the host is obv. wrong, but Im curious why he would email a billing question to technical support and rely on their answer, then pull his account.

Hi -

Good question - actually, I sent multiple e-mails to both addresses because I suspect that Cedant has a similar set up staff-wise as Hostrocket, Hostmatters and other smaller hosting companies - between one and five employees.

I should have mentioned in my very long and rambling rant that I had initially confirmed via both the support and billing e-mails that a refund would be provided.... just so that's clear.

Normally I wouldn't double post them, but after being ignored by sending the request to their billing address, I figured sending it to both wouldn't hurt.

Does anyone know if filing a complaint through one of the online complaint sites will help? It's only around $45 US, but seeing how terrible the Canadian dollar is (sigh)... it works out to something like $600 bucks Canadian - heh.

Neil

I doubt it would be worth your time to collect 45.00 but if you paid by credit card, I believe you can just dispute the charges, they may be the easiest way to go, any other way that I would normally suggest wouldnt be worth 45.00 in time or would cost more than 45.00.

Update:

I was just contacted a couple of days ago by the Cedant billing folks. Seems they had a problem with the DNS and hadn't updated it to reflect my new host (the e-mail address I was using with them was transferred to a new host).

So, the additional credit has been paid and the account is cleared up.

Ah, one of those times that you wish people used the TELEPHONE more...

Neil