Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Running a Web Hosting Business : Customers leaving in the middle of the night

[maknet]

Occasionally, we have a client that just picks up an leaves.

i'm talking about finding another host (like godaddy) and switching DNS's etc.)

Question: After that point (especially when they don't return your calls) do you just assume they left and go through with the appropriate cancellation process?

I mean, giving the benefit of the doubt, there is a very small possibility, they changed IP addresses but are still using URL-forwarding to your site.

In the case i'm talking about, the website A record is pointed elsewhere as is the DNS. The MX is still pointing to our servers though... and no response - of course.


Lawrence

[Dan_EZPZ]

We just leave them, if they don't pay their invoice after X amount of days, their account gets suspended then terminated.

I wouldn't cancel anyones account if they're still within their billing period and not requested cancellation.

[SingleHopSteph]

Originally Posted by Dan_EZPZ

We just leave them, if they don't pay their invoice after X amount of days, their account gets suspended then terminated.

I wouldn't cancel anyones account if they're still within their billing period and not requested cancellation.

I agree, I would wait until their invoice is due. If they don't pay then I would try to contact them several times as sometimes they are on vacation/family issues, etc. Also, take a look at their history (if they have one)usually the fly-by-night clients are outside of the country and we can't send them to collections.

[maknet]

Not fly-by-night as in, they are bad customers.

As in, they just switched providers.

The only issue i have with the invoicing method, is past experience has shown that 100% of the people that left, didn't plan on paying the future invoices (and rarely contact). So you have the voice-mail tag and other fun games before you decide they are no longer going to pay anything and it gets cancelled etc.

Similarly, does anyone keep the backups of the files?

Lawrence

[SingleHopSteph]

I understand that it can be frustrating but terminating someone's account that actually was going to pay is going to give you a huge headache. I think that this is just one of the drawbacks with doing business online.

As far as the backups, once the account is terminated, we do not keep the files.

[Brian-de-vie]

Originally Posted by maknet

Similarly, does anyone keep the backups of the files?

Short answer is yes, but then I leave myself with the next Q / headache:
for how long ?

To be honest, whatever the circs. I get realy miffed with clients/exclients that will not communicate, there the ones that realy are not worth having.
But I guess I also get miffed with those that 'over communicate',
so maybe it's just me ?

[Plutost]

I would never suspend their account nor Terminate it, unless I get an confirmation email from that client.
Infact, I would send emails after emails to have his confirmation of what to do with his account and whether he would like to Pay the Invoice & continue his account or get it Terminated.

[ldcdc]

I would never suspend their account nor Terminate it, unless I get an confirmation email from that client.

Agreed, I'd rather deal with an "I didn't use this account for 6 months now, I want a refund" than an "Why the heck did you cancel my account for? I still had use for it and have always been paying on time."

[jstanden]

Originally Posted by maknet

The only issue i have with the invoicing method, is past experience has shown that 100% of the people that left, didn't plan on paying the future invoices (and rarely contact).
[...]
Similarly, does anyone keep the backups of the files?

We'll suspend a site after 30 days of non-payment unless there's some kind of "promise to pay". 30 days after that we'll remove it from the server.

We absolutely keep backups of canceled sites. It only takes a few minutes and we ship the bits off to Amazon S3 (which we'll generally keep for around a year). You never know if they had some tragedy (like illness or a death in the family) and losing all their data would just compound it. You can always ignore the money situation for a moment and try to get them talking by asking if they need a copy of their backup "before you delete it". I wouldn't hold the files hostage.

Our situation is slightly different since we mostly do application hosting (On-Demand/SaaS) rather than standard web hosting, but it's the same general idea. We also started out as a host.

[Kusai]

Well we have customers from some Asian countries who order dedicated server and dont even care to inform us before leaving and i guess this is common in the same region, and they the longest customer i had was 3 months. So this leaves us no choice so we just pull the plug on second day of their billing date.

[njoker555]

Originally Posted by Dan_EZPZ

We just leave them, if they don't pay their invoice after X amount of days, their account gets suspended then terminated.

I wouldn't cancel anyones account if they're still within their billing period and not requested cancellation.

I agree with that because they could just be trying stuff out and it is within their right to keep their account for as long as the billing term lasts - otherwise you could be facing legal issues if you have something in your TOS or something telling everyone that you won't cancel accounts before billing periods, or anything relating to that.

You're better off just leaving them alone - better to let then go quietly than to give you a headache about the situation.

[IMeanWebHosting]

Originally Posted by Brian-de-vie

Short answer is yes, but then I leave myself with the next Q / headache:
for how long ?

When a clients account is closed for any reason, I grab their latest backup and store it on an external hard drive at my office for, well, forever. I'm not sure how practical this is for larger hosts, but I figure that doing it the way I do will at some point in time payoff somehow. Even if it doesn't, terabyte externals are cheap these days, so I'm not really losing out on much.

[TonyB]

Originally Posted by Plutost

I would never suspend their account nor Terminate it, unless I get an confirmation email from that client.
Infact, I would send emails after emails to have his confirmation of what to do with his account and whether he would like to Pay the Invoice & continue his account or get it Terminated.

People actually will respond to you? We've had reminder emails sent daily to users who still do not bother. If we did not terminate accounts we'd have to dedicated entire servers to delinquent accounts.

Originally Posted by IMeanWebHosting

When a clients account is closed for any reason, I grab their latest backup and store it on an external hard drive at my office for, well, forever. I'm not sure how practical this is for larger hosts, but I figure that doing it the way I do will at some point in time payoff somehow. Even if it doesn't, terabyte externals are cheap these days, so I'm not really losing out on much.

Yeah not really practical on a large scale unless you enjoy it costing you $50,000/yr or some silly number to store data of users who have moved onto other providers.

[plumsauce]

It would be probably reasonable to send out notice that access will be suspended, and then suspend the account while leaving the contents intact. At some point, you may want to archive it off. As some posters have said, someday that backup will save someone's butt, and they will be forever grateful.

As an aside, it is always daylight hours somewhere in the world.

[AquariusStorage]

If they are paid up, why suspend them? Keep their account active. If they reach their renewal date, and do not renew, follow your standard cancellation process found in your terms of service hopefully. (Example: 10 days late, suspend...30 days, terminate)