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I have been a costumer for about 20 years or so of ovh and if i paid say 6 months upfront then the next invoice would be for another 6 months upfront, it never gave me a chance to pay monthly, god knows how you was able to pay monthly after paying upfront for the first invoice.
Machine learning applied to cybersecurity. We have customers that face different types of issues (botting, cheating, fraud, ddos, reverse engineering, etc), we study each use case and build a model for each customer.
We also help companies understand what they are buying from other vendors and whether they are being sold snake oil, it helps them decide whether to close a hefty contract (typically 5-6 digit contracts) or negotiate a better pricing/contract terms.
Our server usage increased because some companies prefer we manage all the deployments, uptime, model maintenance, etc. We are not public nor backed by VC/investors so our prices are generally very reasonable compared to what other companies would ask for.
The platform is definitely subpar, it's a shame because I really like their servers and protection.
With all being said, its very likely that we come back at some point, I believe the root of our incident was due to the poor management of the first ticket, had somebody else handled it, its very likely we would have found a mutual agreement within weeks if not days.
Yes, I say all this, but I still use them, their services are great
Yes, I was about to say, don't spend extra money, or at least not at any cost, to avoid OVH if they're better suited to your operations because of one guy in support. With big companies like that, it's very much a matter of luck when it comes to support
Sucks though that their development of their panel and billing is so garbage, better management there could have saved them a lot of frustrations and quite honestly, a lot of money on support
F*ck France ! Yeah we're right not to pay. Don't let any company bully you like this.
Can you like stop commenting useless on post? This doesn't contribute anything to the post itself. And also I don't think it's a good idea to discriminate a country because the hosting provider is located there ..
+1, well its a contract no matter what. OP agrees to it, and he do not cancel the commitment on time which I believe is 30 days before renewal date (of yearly commitment). Contract is a contract, once you start getting the service it means you agreed to the terms/cancellation policy, etc... That's why better be sure of what you're getting into read carefully of the terms/policy. But I believe it's settled as OP said, but hope this been a lesson to OP as he might do this with other provider also
This is less confusing as you're pre-paying for the service and can cancel before the due date if you wish.
OVH's current billing policies are more flexible in that they allow you to not pre-pay but sign a contract for 6/12/24 months. You pay monthly and get a reduced price for longer term contracts but you're on the hook for the entire contract period. This is all fine, but the catch is the contract itself auto-renews, say you signed up for a 1 year contract and you were thinking to cancel it on the 13th month but find out you've been auto-renewed for another year. I think this is what has happened to @joams 😅
Pavin.
I assume you are from france :P
German hosting companies are way worse. In 2019, servdiscount overhauled their UI and hid the "prepaid contract" option under a concealed dropdown menu, so I was unknowingly signing up for a month-to-month continuous lease without even realizing it, even though every order in the past has defaulted to prepaid with automatic termination if you ignored the invoice. It took some war on words with accounting to get them to cancel one of the invoices (though I did have to pay for one month that I didn't use). Being in the USA helped since their threats to come to me for debt collection fell on deaf ears.
I'm an OVH customer and will always be one, but the big EU hosting companies seem to be very scammy and sly into trying to trap people into "contracts." Thankfully for OVH I never chose a commitment, which frankly that freedom to get out whenever you want is worth paying the higher monthly price/setup fee if it means avoiding the stress of a huge unwanted bill/horrible legal headache down the road.
My rule of thumb is if you can't afford to pay the next full contract term, then don't go for a commitment. That is, if you're looking at a $2000/yr contract, you should be able to take a $4000 expense without going into duress. Only then is the gambit to save on the contract discount perhaps worthwhile. For anything that's over $250/yr, I stick to month-to-month since saving $25 or so is not worth the risk of forgetting to terminate the contract on time and then being hit by another $250 bill the next year for a server I no longer want.
I understand, yes some of our German friends do this like NetCup, IONOS, Strato. But Hetzner and Avoro are both monthly paid never had problems with them with billing. Also the whole contract thing is a bit bullshit because if you become difficult they will end up with nothing anyway. A debt collection agency is a company not the police so if you ignore them for a while they will stop eventually.
Unfortunately far east Asia.
Why is that unfortunate?
Great to hear.
Yeah, every time like minded people (example industry peers) gather in one place you can expect some level of groupthink like the oscars/academy awards ceremony. Somebody gives a rousing speech and then everybody else applaud and pat each other on the back while the rest of the world with some common sense wonder what they're on about. Doesn't mean you're in the wrong for going against them.
Exhibit A: all the context-free contract thumping idiots when you started the thread
Exhibit B: some contract thumping idiots who still did it after you stated the conclusion
If something like this ever happens to anyone else and feel that you're in the right, you give the debt collector all your evidence (screenshots, etc) and then you give them the contact of your divorce or real estate lawyer or tax lawyer and tell the collector they (the lawyer) would represent you on all communications on the matter going forward. If the collector follows through and forces your hands then your lawyer will contact you, you pay some hundreds in legal bills, apologize to the "wrong" lawyer, switch to correct one, then go to court.
If not (~90% chance) you bully back the bully.
Why give your real estate lawyer's contact instead of a random lawyer from the yellow pages?
If the collector presses on, you're screwed lol. The random lawyer won't contact you back.
Depends on where you live though. In some places, it's more effective to go with the village gangster, religious clerics, elder council, or the blind moth priests.
At the moment, in OVH everything is renew by the 1st date, unless manually renew in advance, and is written off in the general invoice. I don’t even know who came up with this system, but it has become a super inconvenient thing for resale.
From 2019 to 2023 there was an commitment, but it did not work for the CIS countries in OVH. If the server was not paid for, it was simply deleted and that was all. It was cool and convenient. Now OVH has been brought to the European method of billing, when a pack arrives and for everything.
Looking at many years of work in hosting. I understand that this is not the case in Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and other countries of the former USSR. No matter what service or hosting I take, no one will sell you the service on credit or charge you money. Everything is short and simple: you pay for the service; if you don’t pay, it is deleted and any service can be extended in advance by pressing one button.
I recently had a billing issue with OVH, but since it was the same amount, I didn't care. I have a cheap yearly VPS special and at the end of last year, they started charging monthly.
I received an email on Jan 22nd.
That sounds similar to the issue the OP here probably experienced.
Now that OVH is doing all these fixes, lets give credit where it's due. Hopefully there's less of the heavy handed nonsense and more providers owning up to their own mistakes.
The Inability to pay is the mitigating factor. The customer explained he can not pay the bill hence the terms of the contract is void. A new contract has to be enforced which the supplier agreed to by accepting payment on a monthly bases. Renewal of the service monthly evokes a new agreement and payments have been accepted. Therefore the customer is within his right to continue under the new contract without any harassment from the supplier to pay beyond his means.