Hi, I'm confused about why clients need to cancel in the first place?

Won't the host realize it?

Anyways, I have prepaid up to 6 more weeks, I believe...
Will they pay me back if I cancel now?

What are you saying?

You first ask why clients cancel then say you are cancelling :eek:

As far as being payed back...as your web host.

Ah, I'm on a virtual account.

I don't know of any host that pays back for what you prepaid if you cancel early...

Your best to pay monthly. I seriously recommend it because some hosts can be very sneaky and sort you out a paid yearly deal at a good offer. The host could close down or you may dislike the service and decide to cancel while at the other end the hont will not be entitled to pay back the money you pre-paid for.

You gotta watch out with some hosts.

Originally posted by webhappy
Hi, I'm confused about why clients need to cancel in the first place?

Won't the host realize it?

An odd question. While a part of the job does seem to entail mindreading at times, I'm pretty sure there's few of us that can actually do it. :)

The other side of the coin is, presume, as a host, you thought someone was sure to cancel, shut them off, then found out they didn't want to. The angry e-mail you'd recieve from the customer would probably peal the paint off the walls.

A general rule of thumb is to do very little without the customer's permission (beside system support of course). Changing passwords, editing sites, and altering the way they're used to doing things is generally going to cause trouble. Shutting them off without confirmation from the customer is about as handy as shoving a fork in your arm.

Unless I missed your point.

Greg Moore

Originally posted by akashik


A general rule of thumb is to do very little without the customer's permission (beside system support of course). Changing passwords, editing sites, and altering the way they're used to doing things is generally going to cause trouble. Shutting them off without confirmation from the customer is about as handy as shoving a fork in your arm.


A friend of mine who runs a Linux hosting service had something of a similar issue like that with a customer once. The customer (a figurines and similar collectibles site) had apparently decided to upload Playboy cover JPGs (not the pictures, just the covers). My friend noticed it when all of a sudden the customer's site went from 500 KB/day to well over 5 GB/day. So the friend immediately shut down the site for what he thought was abuse (and justifiably so).

However...the customer didn't feel this way, for some strange reason, and actually took my friend to court for "loss of online business" and a full refund of the hosting and won because of all things...my friend didn't warn him properly first. He had a Terms of Service page the customer had to agree to before signing up but apparently this didn't enter into the equation.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that a host should generally warn a client before shutting down a website or altering anything for any reason. You never know what kind of a customer you're dealing with. This is why I'd never run a hosting business myself; you're stuck way behind the 8-ball.

That's an odd issue though he probably should have just removed the offending content rather to roast the whole site.

A example is what I'm thinking of was last week when a customer was having issues with Frontpage. Her account looked like a 10 car pile up with copies of the site all over the place. The best solution was to delete all the content and have her upload a fresh copy of her site. We told her as such and ask her if we were allowed to delete what was there to clean things up. She said yes, we did it, then she uploaded again. Problem solved.

Naturally were it s site that had content on it that she didn't have a local copy of it could have proved an issue if we'd deleted first without asking.

Greg Moore

If a customer cancels a yearly contract, they should be refunded what is left if you consider monthly payments plus a 15% penalty fee.

Ex. Plan X = 5/mo or 40/year

customer cancels after 6 months....

40 - 5 * 6 = 10 * .85 = $8.50

10 car pile up, thats funny! :D

I host as well as manage a few sites.
While the main control is in the hands of the customers, I do all kinds of things for them, one of which is software installs. When I noticed a customers message board was screwed up, I emailed him and asked if he wanted me to fix it. He was out of town and it took a week to get ahold of him. He said I could have fixed it without asking first, but I said "I can't do that ,however, if you want to let me know in advance that you will be unavailable and want me to keep an eye on it for you, then I will fix things like that if they come up"
It's always good to get it in writing.
I have also suspended a suspicious account, but only cancelled them after 10 days notice. I made sure I had a full back up incase I was mistaken. Better to be safe than sorry.
You know how many people do not keep backups of their own sites that they build?
I personally don't know how one can build a site on their PC and not have a backup. Like where did they get the files to upload in the first place? :confused:

Easy! Thin air! There's a whole bunch of stuff in thin air!

As far as my friend goes, now he's got one of those recording devices for his phone and every time he makes a call, it gets recorded and archived. Now he calls the client to report suspicious behaviour, and if it keeps up, he calls them again to tell them that their service was cancelled.