I arrived at my client’s office today to find that they are going to switch hosting companies. Of course I asked why – I wasn’t even aware of whom they were using. He proceeds to inform me that when he went to sign up he asked to set up a recurring payment for the $30/month hosting plan and was told that they could not accommodate this.
So let me get this straight. You’re a technology company providing hosting services and you don’t do recurring payments. I can go to PayPal and in 5 minutes give you a link where you can go and pay me a monthly fee for services.
My client is a construction company blessed to be busy in this economy which has been anything but friendly to the construction and real estate business. Point being he doesn’t have time to chase down every $25 bill he gets and make sure it gets paid on the exact due date. I’ll reiterate here that he DID want to set up recurring payments to avoid this exact situation. They couldn’t support that.
So apparently he missed a payment and had a balance of $57. Now if someone owed me $57 I would send them a friendly reminder – hey by the way it looks like you missed this invoice, would you mind sending an a payment or let me know if you have any questions or concerns. Seems like the right way to handle this sort of thing. What did Edgewood Hosting do? They put this up on his website:
Now I could understand this practice if my client was several months late on even a $100 balance. This was one month late on a $57 balance which represents advance payment on a quarterly billing. Besides the obvious embarrassment to my client this is no way to treat a client under these circumstances. Obviously I am switching my client over to Godaddy at $10/month who CAN do recurring billings on someone’s credit card.
When he called to follow up and make arrangements to pay them he asked them about this awful and aggressive practice. The answer:
Well that’s just our policy
Hey Edgewood! Your policy sucks – I would never recommend that anyone use you for hosting unless I knew that policy had changed and that you had at least gotten yourselves a paypal account so you can accept recurring payments. Oh and drop your price to $10/month for basic hosting!
If you are using Edgewood or even considering it, ask yourself, “is this how I want to be treated by my hosting company?”
