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Inception Hosting - Poor Customer Service
chaoszero112
Member
Edit: Too many people have seen this as a "poor me" sob story, which was not the intention.
Here are the simple take aways:
- The service was great at first, but slowly degraded.
- They use a Subscription-based model where you subscribe to sending them x amount of funds at a set interval.
- Other provides use an Agreement based model where an invoice is generated and they collect the funds on the due date.
- Subscription-based does not appear to be the standard with any of the other providers, Inception Hosting seems to be the only one on my PayPal list that does this practice, which can lead to a payment trap.
- I recognize it as being my fault for sending the payment in error.
- I was also stupid for mentioning anything law related.
- Inception Hosting seems plainly aware of the pitfalls of using the Subscription-based model but have done nothing to address it (ie switch from Subscription to Agreement billing with PayPal)
- Despite opening a PayPal claim or dispute, it can still be cancelled by the initiator. The parties can still come to an agreement outside of PayPal (in fact, it's encouraged).
- There is no requirement to lock the disputed account, especially when it's the main means of communication between the parties. Freezing the disputed funds would have been acceptable.
- They also could have said "we are locking the account until the PayPal claim is resolved" instead of simply locking it out with no word.
- The response from Inception Hosting was not that of empathy or pro-consumer, but rather a "sucks to be you" robot reply. It was clear they've seen the scenario numerous times but don't see it as something that needs to be addressed to prevent it in the first place.
Not looking for anyone to agree or disagree with me, point blame at anyone, etc. There is an arguable issue with the billing system the provider uses and I would recommend against knowingly getting involved with it when other providers don't have this same practice.
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I had inception hosting back in 2017 when I grabbed a decent Black Friday deal.
Despite being "SSD-cached", the drives were slow (US 2048 KVM). It wasn't unusual to dip down to as low as 4Mb/s, according to bench.sh. So after a year or 2, I cancelled the service. (Yes, I was pretty slow in doing so. I seem to have an issue leaving servers idling:))
What I failed to do was cancel my PayPal subscription. Typically, any services I use open a PayPal agreement and bill me when the time comes. I quickly learned, however, that Inception Hosting does it differently. Instead of opening an agreement, they direct you to open a subscription which you send them money. Essentially, you are pushing them money rather than them pulling it.
I checked all my other service providers (OVH, RackNerd, Virmach, Alibaba Cloud, SSDNodes, to name a few) and none of them do that.
It leaves it very easy for you to fall into a trap of continuing to give them money. Given the wording in their invoice and help documentation, they know this (to be fair, they do try to warn you, but if they are aware of the scenario where consumers can continue to give them money accidently, why don't they change the subscription/push format to an agreement/pull like everyone else?).
I end up noticing the charge and within 30 minutes ask them to reverse it. Surprisingly, they refused, and made it clear "You sent us the money, we didn't ask for it. It's ours now" (my paraphrasing). They cited a fee they get charged from PayPal for refunded transactions, which I would have gladly covered. Ultimately, the result was I was left with a credit of €48EUR. Was it my fault for failing to cancel the subscription? Certainly. But from a PR standpoint it's very anti-consumer.
I decided to see if PayPal would return the extra charge, as the original agreement for the subscription was for a server to be provided, not a credit. Figured the worst that could happen is they say no, right?
Well I open the dispute and upon doing so Inception Hosting locked me out of my account.
This is only after sending 2 messages to them. One asking for a refund, and one saying it's against consumer laws to charge without providing services (this was before I realized that the PayPal agreement was me pushing the money). No hostility, no profanities.
They sent me one image before locking my account:
I would love to know how I can use an account credit for services when you lock me out of the account.
So what started as a simple mistake of me sending extra funds turned into Inception Hosting locking away those funds.
Comments
I don't know how this will be resolved for you. I learned the hard way as well with another provider. Now I check my paypal subscriptions etc after my services are provisioned and cancel agreements. I also check periodically to cancel agreements. Maybe dispute on Paypal and ask for either refund or functioning account for if no functioning account- services are not delivered as prescribed.
Unfortunately, discussing law with lET providers always leads to bad outcome especially since it was you who pushed the money.
Paypal is a bit quirky. However, providers need to accept the fact that when a customer cancels a service, the provider can also cancel a subscription- unfortunately they will claim WHMCS wont do it blah blah blah. It is just a case of firms designed to take money on the front end and not caring about the end of agreements.
Well, you deserved that..
I deserve to be locked out of a service I paid for?
Actually I also had same experience with them. There VPS works good in starting and after 4-5 months they are very slow. Same paypal trap but I just ignored them and last year I have not ordered anything from him while earlier I use to have 2 - 3 VPS.
@chaoszero112 - Thank you for the feedback. However, this forum is not for Inception Hosting support. Maybe it's better to open a support ticket with that provider, or contact them directly, especially when it comes down to sensible information like payments.
You already answer that yourself on your first post.
@default I guess the forum is to only bitch about romania?
Well there's another thing with this. I signed up for a different service with Paypal but only with the email I used (never logged in actually) and now I can't find the sub anywhere.
That's exatly what happened. It was a great box at first, then slowed down later on.
Would love to. Except they locked my account because I opened a support ticket.. So..
I may have "deserved" to not get a refund. Besides it being a questionable payment trap, it was ultimately my fault for sending the funds. However, there is no justification to them placing the payment as a credit on the account and then locking the account. That's just thievery.
Yeah tbh paypall makes it a bitch to find active subscriptions. Tbh any buisness that uses them should really send an email to clients reminding them to cancel on paypall as well.
You opened paypal dispute that's why they locked your account.
People can complain about anything. A huge downtime with police raid involved and 22k affected services is a much better popcorn drama, than a user complaining about some Paypal subscription which can be handled in a support ticket. Besides, it's Black Friday.
That sounds like retaliation. A dispute with a payment should have nothing to do with access of paid-for account credits.
Have you ever read Paypal subscription and how it work?
It’s so simply that when you active the subscription, you agreed to send money to provider at desired time. Yes, they can not change that, only you and Paypal can.
You wrote a very long reply, why don’t just spend few minutes to read Paypal subscription ToS when you submit Pay button?
Ok. Then we got ourselves the foundations for a good-old-fashioned popcorn drama.
@giang - provider can cancel subscription as well - none of them do though
"You sent us the money, we didn't ask for it. It's ours now"
If you dared to challenge this in a court, they would loose. Of course they have right to cover their expenses related to refund, but they can not simply keep money someone else sent them mistakenly...
Maybe they don't keep track of subscriptions. Maybe there are too many subscriptions. However, not investigating the case, and blocking the user because he opens a support ticket about it, this is the bad part.
@default- yea its too hard for the provider to keep track of where their money comes from- thats just stupid
True...
Did you read the first post correctly?
I believe that they will with a some fees, such as refund fee and time to investigate about the subscription and cancel it.
Hi,
just going to leave this:
And this: https://talk.lowendspirit.com/discussion/2049/remember-to-cancel-paypal-subscriptions/p1 here.
You filed a PayPal reversal/claim (not a dispute) which is why your account was locked.
Typical case of someone shitting on your doorstep and then waking you up at 3am to demand toilet paper.
FR record added.
Happy Black Friday folks, please remember to look after your own money, as you know, it's yours, this is in the hands of PayPal now, any power to remedy the situation was taken away from me.
See you, guys next year, I am sure this thread will descend into drama, you are welcome to it
Money wasn't sent mistakenly. The OP set up a paypal subscription.
Who said being an adult is easy
OP was probably blocked for opening a PayPal dispute.
they dont accept orders from certain country. they have cloudflare blocked these region and recaptcha.
Open a dispute, they made you a favor by blocking your access in that sense.
The ideal resolution would be to refund the money after deducting processing fees. Since, inception hosting are good guys, hope, op will have an acceptable solution soon.
So retaliation?
I am not sure if you know this but Anthony publicly said this many times that a paypal dispute means no communication with customer resulting account locked and he also supports those providers who practice similar scenario. But then again paypal subscription is customer's responsibility.