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Provider 101: WHMCS fails to suspend and gives a customer free service for over a year.
doughmanes
Member
What do you do?
I'm dealing with this issue with a name recognized provider on here and can't break past the Level 1 wall the technician has put up unable to understand. It's not about the money unlike most people on here but trust between a customer and provider.
Provider messes up and can't even give the customer a chance then takes a quick, unrecoverable action that leaves a customer questioning the competence of the provider, the owner and the people who work for the provider.
"Would you like to use the service? (after we terminated your data which is unrecoverable)"
Only notification I got was "Your service was terminated by admin" email which got me to investigate and find out this provider is/has been giving out free service for quite some time.
I'm making this post to get feedback without specifically naming them and I'm going to throw the link in the ticket after the poll.
Comments
Easy resolution for them:
Open up ticket
Explain everything
What action do you want to take?
I would had paid the past due and paid until 2019.
Would I give them any money now? No. Unless somebody at the top can give some details about how to prevent this in the future.
What period of time are we talking about here, a few weeks, a month, 2 years and what billing schedule did you sign up on?
I think that may add a little context.
Annual service. I was one of the first people to sign up with them. (hint hint)
Payment was due 1/1/2017
I've had free service 16 months on an idling service.
I spent more at breakfast this morning than the service amount and the past due amount.
well I think I would have probably would have sent you an "oops" ticket but tbh 16 months past the due date, I cant honestly say a provider is wrong in making a decision either way.
So I guess I have to vote:
I can completely understand why they would terminate, I can also understand why a customer would see that as destructive (not sure why they cant just recover it if you really wanted it).
But like you said, its worth less than 1 days breakfast for almost 2 and a half years of service so meh... cant have been important. (but I get the principal)
This is what you get with race to the bottom pricing because they skimp on staff in billing who can open tickets like this
Poll not found?
take out the www.
7$
Wait wait wait. So you got 16 months free service and the question is about what exactly?
Should the provider have suspended instead of terminate? Probably, yes.
Did they have an obligation to preserve the data on a service that was unpaid for 16 months? Probably not.
Should a customer who's been getting a free service for 16 months (innocently) expect that that their data would be safe from deletion? Probably not.
It sounds like a rather unfortunate situation where both parties are responsible for any loss of data or business, and where either party could have done something to resolve the issue quite easily.
I find it unlikely a client in such a situation can not have realized that the service was going unpaid for so long while also still using it. If you're not using it, then fair enough, these things can go missed for quite some time, but if you use it, then you should know if you're paying for it or not.
TLDR; Client SHOULD know that it's not being paid for. Host should probably only SUSPEND prior to termination. Either both are at fault or neither are at fault for what happened. Or maybe it's WHMCS's fault.
With your endless market research on LowEndTalk for your business and future expansion, you'll have to know "still using it" is up to debate as it could be active, idling or somewhere inbetween where customers may be dealing with other companies.
Is there a "KVM" in the name?
Who's this provider?
In that case they should just terminate and give you the middle finger if you come crying that you lost millions. After all you didnt payed your invoice.
My 2 cents. Obviously you dont care about the service.
I know this probably isn't great, but I rely on providers emailing me invoices to be paid.
Question is did you get an email way back in late 2016 that your bill is due? If you did and didn't pay it, I wouldn't fault the provider for immediately canceling and destroying your services once an audit was done as this would have indicated you didn't need the service any longer.
If a renewal email was never sent, then well I'd at least expect the provider to suspend and put the service on hold to determine if you wanted the box or not.
The customer replies about this aren't really interesting at all because its just wild stabbing. This is why it was posted in Providers.
Summer is coming and people are still trying to get into hosting. Previous providers I worked for, anything data destructive is possibly done shutdown and suspend then open ticket but the providers I worked for aren't race to the bottom pricing yearly folks. Not worth the social media/forum post about the incident because of itchy fingers to click Terminate.
If the customer was reasonably invoiced and sent notice(s) of the invoice, then simply not suspended, I terminate and move on. I have a broken module that I do this with frequently, manual termination tasks stack up and every 6 months or so I run through them by hand.
If the customer was never notified or properly invoiced, I correct the issue and get a new invoice going on the next billing period (time in-between is free, my error does not equal your emergency, etc).
obviously as a provider I would as long as the vps is not infected, affecting other clients, abusing resources,etc I would just leave it active, open a ticket and ask how they would like to proceed after explaining the situation and wait for the consumer to respond though if the vps is abusing resources I would suspend the vps and open a ticket asking how they want to proceed, and state if they want to keep the vps, they need to fix the vps and remove the infection, virus,etc that is causing abuse or resources or just reinstall the vps.
as it only seems fair to me since I am running basically a unmanaged service, that if your vps is infected and you confirm you want to keep it and I unsuspend it after confirming this, you do your due diligence and clean up the vm so the abuse of resources stop, or just reinstall the vm.
though I want to sum up my response basically as I was a customer before too, so I understand both viewpoints and I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt if I can.
That isn't even what's being discussed. This is about non-payment from a client and the provider not making comment nor billing for it and has nothing to do with being infected etc.
okay since I didn't write my thoughts exactly right then let me put it to you differently then:
if they have not paid & had free service for 16 months & the cost was less than a cup of coffee or something I would go with the option: "Leave the service active, open a ticket and give the customer time to respond"
We had similar issue where we missed out, as it was our fault we just offered half of cost what customer owe us and carry on, as customer was happy to pay.
I do believe any provide open ticket first without deleting the account (or just suspend it) as might contain important data to customer and give a choice to customer.
I had something like this happen before with a pretty expensive dedicated server, I submitted a cancellation request, it was acknowledged by WHMCS. I figured I was done, but expiration date came and went, server never was taken down or wiped or anything, lasted like for that for a year, I checked every now and then just to see if it was still up lmao. That server was worth about 300USD too, they just left it up the whole time. Only got taken down when the provider apparently went out of business, I wonder why.
Well basically if the client did not pay for the generated invoice and the module did not suspend it automatically then the provider should terminate the service immediately as the invoice wasn't PAID for the service being used.
Although depending on the service/product or relationship with the client, in my personal view, I would rather send an email and explain the client what happened, expecting him to pay for the unpaid duration of the service. Would give a time frame of 24-48h and if theres no response, terminate the service immediately.
EDIT:
Basically what jarland said.
let change the place here. If you are charged by a provider for error you will open a tiket no ? or wrost you will make directly a chargeback. So way do not open a tiket to infor the provider about a error wich is give you a service...? In the past i paste the same anddefinetly i have directly terminate the service.
ps is just my 2 cents , nothing personal
Its a software fault on your site, I wanna see the claims you try to charge the client.
Technically he did not paid for that, he terminated his service, so turn it off?
Maybe send him a mail, but thats it.
yeah, I mean the invoice was sent, it was not paid, if it was terminated a week after the due date (fairly standard) for none payment, this conversation would not be happening, a software error allowed to to remain running, that does not change the fact the invoice was not paid, if the end user chose not to pay, the outcome should not be surprising.
Either way though, given the extreme nature of this particular situation giving 24 - 48 hours may not have been the worst idea, but I cant say the actual outcome is surprising, the key fact being that an invoice WAS sent and NOT paid.
K
Which reminds me that I have an mxroute invoice pending.. Hang on to it (and my emails) for a few more hours.. (I don't trust payments via phone) And I'll pay you coffee next time you around.
That won't work @404error because you can never be found.
Sushhh that's exactly why I keep offering stuff to people.
I'm the LET version of real life politicians.
Poll not found. I would definitely suspend but there's variable factors. Suspend yes. Open a ticket? Maybe, maybe not if they haven't logged in for ages. But an email notification would be sent anywho to take the next step.