Wouldn't use them again - VERY slow setup

Catmcauliffe's Response to robertja's Review

Written on: 06/02/2013

Hi,

Firstly, I would like to thank you for your comments--I am glad to hear you are happy with our prices, hosting, and control panel.

However, you are incorrect about our accepted payment methods. While we use PayPal as our payment processor, customers do not need to have a PayPal account in order to pay us via credit or debit cards. We also accept Google Checkout, cheques, and postal orders.

We use PayPal as our payment processor because we have been unable to get a merchant account from a bank, a requirement for processing credit and debit cards with other processors. Also, without a merchant account, we cannot offer direct debit to our customers. While PayPal enables users to set up subscriptions, we had to disable this feature because we had approximately 100 customers who set up multiple subscriptions for a single service.

When we have tried to get a merchant account in the past, we were told by banks that they would not give a merchant account to a web hosting provider because the industry has an extremely high rate of fraud and chargebacks.

We periodically check with banks to see if their policies have changed, as we realise some of our customers would prefer to have an alternative payment processor.

Because fraud is such an issue in the web hosting industry, we manually review all orders before accepting them. As a result, it may take a while for some customers to receive their account details. While this is not ideal, we don't allow automatic setup because of all the issues fraudulent orders can cause. Aside from chargebacks, fraudulent orders can cause a multitude of issues; if a spammer signs up with stolen details, they can use a hosting account to send spam. When a spammer uses our hosting to send bulk emails, it can put the stability of the server at risk, as well as cause email issues for all of the other people hosted on the same server (the server will get blacklisted, leaving innocent users unable to send, and sometimes receive, email). As a result, we take fraudulent orders extremely seriously, which can sometime result in delays for legitimate users.

In most instances, orders are activated within minutes (except for overnight). The logs we have your account show you paid your invoice for your hosting account on 07/07/2012 at 15:24 and your order was accepted on 08/07/2012 at 19:39. Obviously, your order was not activated in a timely manner, for which I apologise. We dropped the ball, and we have taken steps to prevent this sort of delaying from occurring again in the future. However, it did not take 3 days for us to send you the details for your hosting account.

Also, you opened at ticket on 07/07/2012 at 19:55 and you received a reply on 09/07/2012 at 00:33. Your ticket was opened in the sales department, which is open from 09:00-18:00 Monday to Friday and our SLA guarantees a reply/resolution within 24 hours.

With respect to invoices, we don't send up a follow up email when invoices aren't paid immediately. For hosting accounts, an invoice is generated 7 days before payment is due. 3 days later, people with upaid invoices receive a reminder. When an invoice is overdue, a reminder is sent on the 1st, 4th, and 7th days, as the account will be suspended when the invoice is a week overdue. If a customer pays their invoices on time, they only receive 2 emails about the invoice.

Some customers feel they are reminded too frequently, while others claim we don't remind them enough. We have tried to strike a balance which will please the majority of our 6,000+ active customers, a feat which obviously isn't always easy.

When we received your feedback in July, we took steps to remedy some of the issues you mentioned, and this review will undoubtedly spark additional changes.


All the best,
Caitlin McAuliffe
Co-Managing Director
Evohosting Ltd.