Provider doesn't want to give me a refund even if I am in the EU and within 14 days of purchase

vitobotta

I ordered a server from a German provider since the price looked good and I wanted to use it with some application. Well the performance was really bad and I didn't really want to waste time so I asked a refund.

I am in Finland and this provider is in Germany, so we are both in the EU which means that by law I can withdraw within 14 days from purchase and I don't even need to give a reason.

They are going around and around saying that this is a service, not a product blah blah blah. A lot of nonsense. The EU laws cover any product or service purchased with distance selling. And they know it because they have it written even in their terms!

Anyway, in case they don't give me the refund what is the easiest way to get my money back? It's not much, it's 9 euros, but it's the principle and because of their attitude that I want a refund even more now.

Should I file a dispute with PayPal?

Thanks

JabJab

@contabo_m

VPSSLIM

Refunds in EU do not apply for digital goods. Though, we for instance do offer a 14-day money back guarantee but not all providers do. What did you agree upon with your provider?

vitobotta

@VPSSLIM said:
Refunds in EU do not apply for digital goods. Though, we for instance do offer a 14-day money back guarantee but not all providers do. What did you agree upon with your provider?

You're mistaken, what is not covered is digital downloads like music, movies etc. This is entirely different

dosai

Who is the provider? What does their tos say?

stefeman

You cant do anything about it anyway.

vitobotta

@dosai said:
Who is the provider? What does their tos say?

I'll wait before naming them, so to give them the time to do the right thing.

vitobotta

@stefeman said:
You cant do anything about it anyway.

Why is that?

Aidan

@JabJab said:
@contabo_m

Definitely not Contabo, they comply fully with the legislation & disclosure requirements:
1. https://contabo.com/en/legal/terms-and-conditions/ (Clause 5.5)
2. https://contabo.com/en/legal/right-of-withdrawal/

vitobotta

@Aidan said:

@JabJab said:
@contabo_m

Definitely not Contabo, they comply fully with the legislation & disclosure requirements:
1. https://contabo.com/en/legal/terms-and-conditions/ (Clause 5.5)
2. https://contabo.com/en/legal/right-of-withdrawal/

No, it's not Contabo. I tested a VPS and their object storage a few days ago and while it took a while for them to reply, it seems that they are going to comply. But I haven't received their refund yet.

DP

Did they say explicitly that they won't be issuing you a refund or are you just assuming they won't?

angstrom

@vitobotta said: I ordered a server from a German provider since the price looked good and I wanted to use it with some application. Well the performance was really bad and I didn't really want to waste time so I asked a refund.

But I thought that you said that you were done with low-end providers!

This isn't a high-end provider, is it?

vitobotta

@DP said:
Did they say explicitly that they won't be issuing you a refund or are you just assuming they won't?

Basically yes, they say that "this is not a product but a service", as it if makes any difference. So I asked again for a refund and am waiting for a response.

@angstrom said:

@vitobotta said: I ordered a server from a German provider since the price looked good and I wanted to use it with some application. Well the performance was really bad and I didn't really want to waste time so I asked a refund.

But I thought that you said that you were done with low-end providers!

This isn't a high-end provider, is it?

What can I say... 9 euros for 6 cores and 6GB of RAM is not bad, is it?

risharde

Sounds like you also hardly used the service. I hate when companies think it is a good idea to not refund if you are unsatisfied and for example only had the service for a few days.

Name and shame?

Erisa

Can't give much advice beyond the usual "Have you tried linking and quoting the law passage to them" without knowing the provider.

I had a (not server) provider pull this with me as well, though in my case over a lapsed trial subscription I hadn't used. I sent them a link to the EU law website that covered this topic, quoted the relevant passage and they processed a refund even though their terms said they don't do refund ever.

I say name and shame.

vitobotta

@risharde said:
Sounds like you also hardly used the service. I hate when companies think it is a good idea to not refund if you are unsatisfied and for example only had the service for a few days.

Name and shame?

I literally created the service, complained about the poor performance and was told that that the average I/O of 189 MB/sec of THEIR OWN BENCHMARK was acceptable, and of course I disagree. That doesn't look like SSD performance and the GB5 was 800-something, which is very low for the CPU they sell. That's why I asked for a refund.

vitobotta

@Erisa said:
Can't give much advice beyond the usual "Have you tried linking and quoting the law passage to them" without knowing the provider.

I had a (not server) provide pull this with me as well, though in my case over a lapsed trial subscription I hadn't used. I sent them a link to the EU law websitte that covered this topic, quoted the relevant passage and they processed a refund even though their terms said they don't do refund ever.

I say name and shame.

Yes I linked to the legislation with a quote on the cooling off period.

Ok the provider is this https://server.unesty.net/?language=english

Erisa

Also

@vitobotta said: Should I file a dispute with PayPal?

You are within your rights to dispute this, but keep in mind that they can and likely will fight back at you with full force, since for them it's not about the 7 euros its about being flagged by PayPal as a fraudulent seller.

By opening a dispute, you will permanently burn all bridges between you and this provider, and they will likely never offer you services ever again. You need to make sure you're fully prepared and confident that this is the only option left to you and that you want to fight this battle.

DP

I predict the ending to this would be:

"Provider finally refunded."

"Thanks everyone for your feedback!"

drizbo

I think ur just bored so we chat a bit here now. Theres no point to this thread because you dont wanna even say who it is. Just whining, last thread you named something like "never lowend server again" and here you complain about IO on 6core & 6gb vm for 9$. Are you really surprised??? What the fuck did you expect?

vitobotta

@Erisa said:
Also

@vitobotta said: Should I file a dispute with PayPal?

You are within your rights to dispute this, but keep in mind that they can and likely will fight back at you with full force, since for them it's not about the 7 euros its about being flagged by PayPal as a fraudulent seller.

By opening a dispute, you will permanently burn all bridges between you and this provider, and they will likely never offer you services ever again. You need to make sure you're fully prepared and confident that this is the only option left to you and that you want to fight this battle.

Yeah I am not interested in their services. It's mostly because of their attitude that I have asked for a refund.

vitobotta

@DP said:
I predict the ending to this would be:

"Provider finally refunded."

"Thanks everyone for your feedback!"

I hope that's the case

@drizbo said:
I think ur just bored so we chat a bit here now. Theres no point to this thread because you dont wanna even say who it is. Just whining, last thread you named something like "never lowend server again" and here you complain about IO on 6core & 6gb vm for 9$. Are you really surprised??? What the fuck did you expect?

Actually I eventually said above who the provider is. I know, I shouldn't have expected much for their price but like I said their "support" told me that 189 MB/sec on an SSD is acceptable. And for a Ryzen CPU with clock 4.0-4.7 800 GB5 is also unexpected.

Erisa

@vitobotta said: Ok the provider is this https://server.unesty.net/?language=english

Thank you for the link. Unfortunately their terms are in German so I'm not able to understand them without translating (And Google Translate's interpretation doesn't hold up legally when it comes to law sadly)

The (translated) terms however have this passage:

As a citizen of an EU country, you have the right to revoke this contract within fourteen days without giving reasons, as long as the products agreed in the contract are sold in the EU. The cancellation period is fourteen days from the day the contract was concluded. In order to exercise your right of withdrawal, you must send us, Unesty Company, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 5, 09648 Mittweida, phone: +49 (0) 15221751111, email: [email protected] by means of a clear statement (e.g. a sent letter, fax, e-mail or via the secured online administration area) about your decision to revoke this contract. You can use the model cancellation form for this, but it is not mandatory. To meet the cancellation deadline, it is sufficient for you to send the communication regarding your exercise of the right of cancellation before the cancellation period has expired.

It also says (translated)

If you revoke this contract, we have paid you all payments that we have received from you, including the delivery costs (except for the additional costs resulting from the fact that you have chosen a different type of delivery than the cheapest standard delivery offered by us have), immediately and at the latest within fourteen days from the day on which we received the notification of your cancellation of this contract.

If they still aren't doing it despite you being as clear and polite as possible, honestly just dispute. They are ignoring their own terms (and the law) and PayPal will make short work of them.

Make sure you cancel service (with "immediate" cancellation if it's a WHMCS thing) to make your intentions clear, then ask again after doing so if you haven't already.

vitobotta

@Erisa said:

@vitobotta said: Ok the provider is this https://server.unesty.net/?language=english

Thank you for the link. Unfortunately their terms are in German so I'm not able to understand them without translating (And Google Translate's interpretation doesn't hold up legally when it comes to law sadly)

The (translated) terms however have this passage:

As a citizen of an EU country, you have the right to revoke this contract within fourteen days without giving reasons, as long as the products agreed in the contract are sold in the EU. The cancellation period is fourteen days from the day the contract was concluded. In order to exercise your right of withdrawal, you must send us, Unesty Company, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 5, 09648 Mittweida, phone: +49 (0) 15221751111, email: [email protected] by means of a clear statement (e.g. a sent letter, fax, e-mail or via the secured online administration area) about your decision to revoke this contract. You can use the model cancellation form for this, but it is not mandatory. To meet the cancellation deadline, it is sufficient for you to send the communication regarding your exercise of the right of cancellation before the cancellation period has expired.

It also says (translated)

If you revoke this contract, we have paid you all payments that we have received from you, including the delivery costs (except for the additional costs resulting from the fact that you have chosen a different type of delivery than the cheapest standard delivery offered by us have), immediately and at the latest within fourteen days from the day on which we received the notification of your cancellation of this contract.

If they still aren't doing it despite you being as clear and polite as possible, honestly just dispute. They are ignoring their own terms (and the law) and PayPal will make short work of them.

Make sure you cancel service (with "immediate" cancellation if it's a WHMCS thing) to make your intentions clear, then ask again after doing so if you haven't already.

Yeah that's what I have done. I am waiting for another reply after stating again that I expect a refund.

jar

Most providers aren't going to listen to any legal advice from a customer. Even if you are right, it's very understandable. If I paid a lawyer for their time every time a customer asked me to (thinking across my different roles at different companies), prices would have needed to be raised for every customer. Which, in turn, drives the customer to the company that won't hire a lawyer to give them responses to tickets, so it never actually does anything but shut down a company for no benefit to anyone. Support techs need to be able to trust that their policies are legal, they don't necessarily need to be able to defend it in their roles because that's an entirely different path in education and salary.

It sounds to me like you may actually have law on your side, but now you have to think about options and the value of them. If it costs you to pursue this, it's quite possible that it isn't worth your time or money, and they know that.

As a thought exercise: You can totally break the law if the law requires the offended party to hire a lawyer, if you sell a product for pennies and only to people with low income and your customer base is too small for a class action to have legs. Crazy. right?

For you I don't know. Maybe it's just a complaint to a relevant authority? Maybe they'll consider it worth their time to pursue, maybe they won't. But at least if you can do that it's free.

Erisa

@jar said: For you I don't know. Maybe it's just a complaint to a relevant authority? Maybe they'll consider it worth their time to pursue, maybe they won't. But at least if you can do that it's free.

Another free option in this specific case is to dispute to PayPal, which I would recommend.

Since the law is on the side of the customer in this case, PayPal should (If the system is working as intended) side with them and not only would they get their money back the provider would be most likely trusted less by PayPal and suffer the consequences of their actions.
And losing a single PayPal dispute as a customer doesn't have any bad effect besides the provider exiling you forever, so when it's the right thing to do I think it's the smartest move forward.

And that's why I recommend OP should collect their case and present it to PayPal.

vitobotta

Does PayPal look also into issues with this EU regulation?

Falzo

@vitobotta said: I said their "support" told me that 189 MB/sec on an SSD is acceptable.

for sure it can be acceptable, 189MB/s is a measurement only for bandwidth and at a blocksize of 4k this comes out at roughly 48k IOps which is totally fine for a SSD. so without knowing what exactly you checked to get to this number, everything else is just blabla.

@vitobotta said: And for a Ryzen CPU with clock 4.0-4.7 800 GB5 is also unexpected

a single score of 800 is usually a good average already, you won't always just get 1000+ just because it says ryzen. it's more important how stable this is and how it scales over the 6 cores.

did you do more than just a quick bench and pre-judging without enough understanding of the numbers you are looking at? remember you bought a virtual server on a shared hostnode. and on top they for sure did not sell nor guarantue any numbers.

go get yourself a dedicated server with the numbers you wish for. more likely it is your attitude or wrong expectation management that is a problem here and you are prone to run around even more, wondering why you still can't find a provider delivering what you are looking for.

apart from that I agree though, the provider should simply refund you. I never understood why providers get into a fight over a few bucks instead of being happy of getting rid of a 'support intensive' client early in the process...

Erisa

@vitobotta said:
Does PayPal look also into issues with this EU regulation?

I am not 100% sure about that, but if the provider is openly ignoring their own refund terms they will most likely honour that. This case is unique bcause the terms of the provider state that they offer refund under EU law but then proceed to not actually do that. Which is very illegal.

From my understanding, PayPal buyer protection will hear any genuine dispute as long as it's well explained. You can also mention the quality issues you had with the product, but mainly only if they advertised better performance on their website before purchasing.

As should be obvious, I am not legal advice and PayPals terms are (Possibly intentionally) vague on the subject.

My main experience of winning a server provider PayPal dispute comes from a different situation where a host deadpooled and didn't fullfill an annual contract in full so I managed to claim a partial refund on the remaining period. The rest of my knowledge comes from external sources.

vitobotta

@Falzo said:

@vitobotta said: I said their "support" told me that 189 MB/sec on an SSD is acceptable.

for sure it can be acceptable, 189MB/s is a measurement only for bandwidth and at a blocksize of 4k this comes out at roughly 48k IOps which is totally fine for a SSD. so without knowing what exactly you checked to get to this number, everything else is just blabla.

This is what they pasted:

-----
getsysperf.com -- https://github.com/iandk/sysperf
-----
System type          : KVM
CPU model            : QEMU Virtual CPU version 2.5+
Number of cores      : 4
CPU frequency        : 4192.120 MHz
Total size of Disk   : 25.0 GB (1.5 GB Used)
Total amount of Mem  : 1666 MB (58 MB Used)
Total amount of Swap : 0 MB (0 MB Used)
System uptime        : 0 days, 0 hour 0 min
Load average         : 0.08, 0.02, 0.01
OS                   : Debian GNU/Linux 11
Arch                 : x86_64 (64 Bit)
Kernel               : 5.10.0-8-amd64
ISP                  : Collin Schneeweiss
ASN                  : AS211301 Collin Schneeweiss
IPv6 Support         : Yes
-----
I/O bandwidth (1st run)  : 191MB/s
I/O bandwidth (2nd run)  : 191MB/s
I/O bandwidth (3rd run)  : 185MB/s
Average I/O bandwidth    : 189.0 MB/s

@vitobotta said: And for a Ryzen CPU with clock 4.0-4.7 800 GB5 is also unexpected

a single score of 800 is usually a good average already, you won't always just get 1000+ just because it says ryzen. it's more important how stable this is and how it scales over the 6 cores.

I get 1200 or more with other Ryzen virtual servers, so I think it's a noticeable difference.

did you do more than just a quick bench and pre-judging without enough understanding of the numbers you are looking at? remember you bought a virtual server on a shared hostnode. and on top they for sure did not sell nor guarantue any numbers.

I have bought enough servers over time to get an idea when I like what I see, and this was not the case

go get yourself a dedicated server with the numbers you wish for. more likely it is your attitude or wrong expectation management that is a problem here and you are prone to run around even more, wondering why you still can't find a provider delivering what you are looking for.

My attitude? I simply ordered a server, I wasn't happy with the performance and was told by support that it's normal, and I just asked a refund because I didn't agree and it's within my rights. What is wrong with my attitude? Genuine question.

apart from that I agree though, the provider should simply refund you. I never understood why providers get into a fight over a few bucks instead of being happy of getting rid of a 'support intensive' client early in the process...

Exactly, going the "we don't provide refunds" with excuses while they even mention the law on their terms seems weird to me.

vitobotta

@Erisa said:

@vitobotta said:
Does PayPal look also into issues with this EU regulation?

I am not 100% sure about that, but if the provider is openly ignoring their own refund terms they will most likely honour that. This case is unique bcause the terms of the provider state that they offer refund under EU law but then proceed to not actually do that. Which is very illegal.

From my understanding, PayPal buyer protection will hear any genuine dispute as long as it's well explained. You can also mention the quality issues you had with the product, but mainly only if they advertised better performance on their website before purchasing.

As should be obvious, I am not legal advice and PayPals terms are (Possibly intentionally) vague on the subject.

My main experience of winning a server provider PayPal dispute comes from a different situation where a host deadpooled and didn't fullfill an annual contract in full so I managed to claim a partial refund on the remaining period. The rest of my knowledge comes from external sources.

Thanks, I will look into PayPal disputes more in details since I have never done this before. @Falzo I forgot to mention that with possibly hundreds of servers I have bought and used in 20 years this is perhaps the 3rd time I ask for a refund.