I need your opinion on the following situation:

I had a website hosted at Hard Hat Hosting - VDS account. Some weeks back, they emailed me saying that my website is using up too many resources which is affecting other accounts on the server. Their suggestion was that I should move up to a dedicated account.

I asked them to give me two weeks but I was told that I should tell them much sooner as the situation was urgent and they had 20other clients to think of. So on their insistence I told them I'll let them know by Monday (this was around 3 or 4 days before). I then looked around for other options as I wasn't too happy with their dedicated server one.

I found one and went mad transferring everything on such short notice but I did so and sent an email asking them to cancel my account.

The next day I get hit with a charge for the next month.

On asking I got told that they require a 14 day notice period - please note that that they are the ones who insisted I do something asap.

Then it turns out they stall me for another week or two as the owner who had asked me to hurry up was out of office. Apparently he had no email access for a week either. I was supposed to be contacted by Thursday morning which extended to Monday.

So 10 days later I get told that they charged me in the morning and the email was sent in the afternoon. Guess what? I get an SMS at the exact time my credit card gets charged. The card was charged over 12 hours after my email and not before as I was told (and I do expect hosting companies to be checking their emails during the day).

Anyway to cut a long story short, they are refusing to refund the amount. I am not using the hosting and in any case they have wasted 2 weeks of that by stalling.

Not to mention that the website that was taking up so many resources on their server is now happily sitting on a dedicated server with 20 other websites and no problems.

This has just left a bad taste in my mouth. So what are my options?
1. Chargeback
2. Forget about it - not worth it

I hadn't used option 1 till now as being a vendor I know it is quite irritating without being given a chance. But honestly how many chances should these people get?

I am totally put off by their service.

So as far as recommendations go - definitely stay away.