How long would you wait to just terminate an account after the account has been suspended for not paying?

Lets say he was a client that has been around for 8-10 months give or take a few.

I normally give them 1 week. After that I send them an email telling them I'll give them two more days. After that, depending on my relationship with the customer, i.e. the length of time they have been with us and their payment history, I may suspend the account.

Ya, that is like what I normally do. I have sent an email to him every other day for the past 2 months and he does not respond to any 4 emails that I have of him?

Would you do a whois lookup and get a phone and call?

I give them a lot of time. At first I send them an email. Then I wait for 10 days. Then I send another email and wait for 5 days. Then I suspend the account and wait for another 5 days and then after 20 days I cancel the account. In some cases (i.e. the customer gets back to me but has a problem with the CC or Paypal) I give them even more time. In one case I have been waiting for 2 months...and I got the money.

i c

The problem is that I have not herd a single thing from this good client.

Thanks for the responces.

Originally posted by WLHosting
Ya, that is like what I normally do. I have sent an email to him every other day for the past 2 months and he does not respond to any 4 emails that I have of him?

Would you do a whois lookup and get a phone and call?

Do you have a contact phone number on file for his account?

I do

but it looks like he moved, his whois does not match his information in my database.

Then you can delete his account then. Some clients do not request for cancellation. You could bill him still if you want :P

Originally posted by UltraUnixNET
Then you can delete his account then. Some clients do not request for cancellation. You could bill him still if you want :P

That's a receipe for a charge back.

Exctly as 2fangs said. therefore, you don't have to call, send an e-mail to his reachable contact, If no reply, just suspend it...

suspend it temporary and delete it end of the month.

Yeah, terminating an account for a short amount of time did not seem logical to me. I suspended the account and was just did not know how long to leave it suspended if they never get back to me. Thanks for everything.

I would give them around 3 weeks and then Terminate.

I send the first notice immediately upon non-payment or credit card being declined and give 5 business days for a reply. I then send a second email and allow another 5 business days, this one stating that the account will be placed on hold (and thus a $30 reactivation fee will apply). Once those 10 business days are up, a notice of the account being placed on hold is sent and we allow another 10 business days for payment (totalling 1 month). If nothing happens by then the account is deleted.

If the customer has been around for a long time and we've formed a relationship, we'll usually be a bit more lenient.

The most amazing thing about this whole process is that if you indeed do shut down a client after 7 days of non-payment due to declined credit card or whatever, that client at least in my experience has about a 50% chance of snapping on you when they find out it's down. On the other hand if you don't suspend it and leave it open for 30 days or more you run the chance that that person will move their website.

There are a lot of people who just skip from one host to the next relying on their 30 day money back guarantees, trial periods, and simply not paying. Pay attention to this, I've been stung plenty of times thinking a long termin client wouldn't do that....

Usually I send an email, call them if possible and/or send an invoice mail mail, give them up to 10 days to respond and then suspend. This way they cannot say you didn't try to contact them and if you didn't contact them properly, that's their fault for not getting you their updated/correct contact info.

Yeah,

Even though I have been in hosting for over a year now. I have never had issues like this. It just takes time and practice to learn all of tricks of the trade. Along with all of the mistakes and experiences you have had :) .

An email is sent 14 days in advance of renewal date if payment is not made and continues until the payment is processed successfully.

After 3 days past the due date, the account is suspended and reminders sent daily.

After 30 days the account is terminated and deleted from the servers in its entirety.

This gives the customer ample time to make arrangements or make payment if they intend to keep the site active.

When I have customers who don't pay, I disable their access to the control panel and FTP at the same time as I send emails about non-payment. For those customers who run online stores, I've been known to change the password to their admin area so they can't access their orders. This leaves their sites up for the public, but they can't do anything about the orders that are coming in...nor can they move their site unless they have a complete backup (including database) on their local machine. It's usually very effective and I get paid within 24 hours.