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Comments
You sure they cannot use parents cards ?
Well, that's another way
Thats how most kids do it .
Where did this loss thing come up?
Besides that, how about you don't start a business that has to absorb 3 years of losses?
There's no reason a business, especially in hosting, should be having to eat that long of an operations loss to make something work.
Francisco
Unless I am missing something, ServerHand had to review his plans because of frauds, and frauds imply losses (if you don't know how to handle them)...
This is a general rule of economics, in every market you should be prepared to absorb the worst scenario, that is commonly 3 years. If you are profitable in 1 year or less, than it is a very good result, up to 3 years is considered acceptable, more than 3 years is a complete fault.
That said, I could be wrong but seems that OP is starting to have financial problems because of a single wrong move/promotion, while one should be financially prepared to absorb this kind of issues for years, or shouldn't be in this market at all. Just my thoughts.
Sorry not OP, I mean ServerHand.
@ServerHand Just get a loan to refund customers or just hit refund when a dispute comes in and have your PayPal go into negatives.
I'm not sure what jurisdiction you're in but this would surely be against consumer protection law. By cancelling a contract mid term you should be refunding for services you haven't rendered, even if it's not the law where you are it's the right thing to do.
Quick question, during the Black Friday sale were you just automatically letting all orders go through without any type of validation? What you've posted makes it sounds like you were auto provisioning and accepting all orders. When you realised this was a mistake why not terminate and refund (for services not rendered) the abusers?
I guess I'm just freaked out by having to float things that long.
Anyway, if he was really doing $10/year deals on leased gear & IP's in Quadranet, I can fully see why he's going to have a hard time dealing with it, especially if it was a huge wave of orders he didn't plan for.
Best of luck to them.
Francisco
I haven't ended any service yet, there's actually no reason for a refund until I end it.
But you said it was planned to end and you had no money? Why wouldn't you be making good on everything now so when the services end everyone is whole?
Because you're young and "impatient"... :P
This is exactly my point. If you are financially strong, you can use this kind of offers to gain new customers without worries. Then they could potentially buy other more expensive services or bring other customers. If you don't have the money to absorb such risks, don't do it.
At present time, there's no money for refunding. Even if we were discontinuing the business and closing down on Jan 1st, it would give me 3 weeks.
What in the world did you order that in more or less 2 weeks you've blown through all the cash you got from clients and now can't honor things?
You're aware you're going to get chargebacked to hell and back right?
Francisco
I suspect this was probably an ill-considered last desperate attempt to get buoyant generally that backfired.
Anyway, I strongly suggest looking for a better option than just cutting people off and giving them vouchers, you can for sure expect a huge amount of chargeback/disputes/claims which in the case of PayPal they will just honor and put you in the red and freeze your account.
I have no idea what sort of numbers you are talking about but it might be worth reaching out to other hosts in the general vicinity for help, some larger hosts may honor your deals for you until the end of the billing period.
If you would have taken the time to read here you would have known all these things, the abuse, the chinese, the chargebacks.
In your case chargebacks will be warranted, you took money for a service you plan on not providing, unless the customers are breaching the ToS (buying your service from china is NOT a breach of ToS as long as there was stock at the time with that pricing and they did not hack your panel to buy it).
I do not wish this to sound as bashing, but welcome to the ruthless world of online business, nobody is interested in the causes of your mistakes, unpreparedness, not researching the market (I personally posted a lot of advice in this sense for hosts), lack of funds to invest, those are not the faults of the customers and nobody will be happy to see you blaming the chinese, even people which suffered UNWARRANTED chargebacks and fraud, this is the reality and you need to understand it as such, not get upset and learn from this experience. If you need help and tips, just pm me or open a thread for help, it is never too late and you might even get some useful ideas if not some other kind of help. I suggest to be very open in it.
Not having the money is NOT an excuse for not giving DUE refunds. Go into liquidation, bankruptcy, what ever, just refund the clients who are owed it.
Really, it's the only reasonable option. Lets say he sold 100 units (super likely at that price). You figure his take home is probably $800 for the year total. Chargebacks are $35/each I think? So worst case he could be out $4500 instead of $800 + couple hundred Quadra is going to bill him.
I don't think a lot of providers are going to be looking to bring on $10/year clients just because of the overhead of it.
Francisco
LET..................... where hosts go to die
..or you could just stuff QuadraNet with the bill for not doing your job, I guess.
Who doesn’t like a negative PayPal balance?
Paypal?
Oh, they love it. They get to put a stop to all outgoing and withhold anything incoming. It's a racket.
I see no honor here, you're disgusting.
My balls are itchy.
Ahh, that's it.
It sounds like a classic case of chargeback'd to oblivion.
Reminds me of this old cringeworthy classic from WHT: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=861850&p=6184614#post6184614
$800 to provide 24x7 service to 100 people for a year. Gross!
That's a $67/mo server, which has to include all bandwidth. And that's to break even. Well, if you have a nulled WHMCS and Solus and are a North Korean high party official with access to slave labor for 24x7 support.
Actually no matter what he does, chargeback is coming. You can't really reason to chinese (some of them anyway). They don't give a shit.
Do us a Favor, post your screenshot Paypal Balance. I want to know how much negative balance you have
Going into bankruptcy wouldn't help with the refunds. He said there's no money to refund so if he does that nobody will get their money back.
Companies going bankrupt sucks... Just lost a couple of thousands to a contractor because of this last month. Sigh...
It's obvious @ServerHand made a mistake in running his company, but if you can't commit to your obligations it's best to just close up shop rather than attempting to profit off of your bad practices. Continuing to operate after telling clients "sorry, we can't provide you service or a refund" is basically telling them "thanks for the money, our other clients will benefit from your loss". This is not a game, this is real life and you are (hopefully) a business so you can't just change the rules to benefit you. Take out a loan or use some line of credit if you can't afford to refund your clients then go get a second job ASAP to pay back the loan/credit.
I'm no stranger to mistakes, I've been making mistakes since day one as a provider some of them to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. The only thing you can do is learn from them and don't make your clients suffer from your mistakes that they did not contribute to. Some of the mistakes will cost you time, money, and headache but it's how you handle them that determines what kind of provider you will be and how successful you will be.
Lastly, explore all of your options before making any announcements and once you make any type of announcement (even a casual comment in a forum thread) stick with it. Uncertainty will hurt you even more than whatever bad decision you made.