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Billing experience with Clouvider at beginning of 2022
This discussion was created from comments split from: Issue with $60 payment to Inception Hosting, now resolved.
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Explaining my whole experience with Clouvider here (including screenshots) and the scam of £6369.35 with 0 days of service.
Disclaimer:
It only shows replies from Clouvider and not my messages, because Clouvider "archived" our account [1] so I am unable to login into the account. I can only screenshot the received replies.
We are a hosting provider our own and used their dedicated servers for reselling purpose and generated a high amount of abuse (roughly 5 abuse mails per week). We had a total amount of 40 dedicated servers with 1280 IPs (/28 per server).
We purchased a total amount of 40 dedicated servers from Clouvider and paid them quarterly in November 2020, each with a /28 subnet. Everything was fine for 2 years until beginning of 2022 they randomly started to get annoyed by the amount of abuse happening on our servers. The volume was always the same, sometimes less, sometimes more, but no significant changes. Eventually, they have started to charge 15 GBP per Abuse report [2]. After more harrassment, they started to throttle all our servers to 10 Mbps and just said to fuck off in a nice way [3]. We stopped using their services (they were unusable anyway due to the throttle) and moved all our customers off. We assumed everything was fine now, until we randomly saw charges on our Credit Card at 9PM. The quarterly £12738.7 invoice was always paid by bank transfer, but for the abuse invoices we added our CC. Anyway, since the CC won't allow a single payment of the full amount due to limits, they sneaked multiple small amounts [4]. After creating a ticket saying that we are not using their services anymore, they still demanded the full amount saying we didn't cancel the services. Which indeed, we didn't - this is our fault. Most services we use/rent automatically run out if not paid in time, but different for Clouvider. Anyway, they still demanded £4,738.71 to unsuspend the services (which we don't use) or they will send a debt collector [5]. Since invoices are always issued 14 days before due, and they have the following text in their ToS:
"20.10 Any dispute relating to the Fees must be raised within 14 days of the invoice being issued. Failing to report the dispute in this term shall deem the invoice accepted and waive any rights of dispute. Any undisputed portion of the invoice must be paid in accordance to this Clause 20."
So we were unable to dispute, despite not using their service. I am well aware that we should have terminated the services in time; this goes completely on us. I still feel like the situation wasn't handled fair after paying a total of ~£96.000 to them for 2 years of service. Eventually after more discussions, Clouvider agreed to refund half of the invoice of £12738.7, leaving us with paying £6369.35 for 0 days of service. Additionally, we had to remove our Reviews on Trustpilot and Google and acknowledge that the payments were taking correctly [6].
I agree that we didn't terminate our (unusable) services in time, but anyway I feel like the situation was not handled fair from Clouvider. We also paid a total of £37,50 for not paying the invoice and they had to manually suspend the service [7]... lol
[1] https://imgur.com/a/6PzFyee
[2] https://imgur.com/ZTclC82 + https://imgur.com/a/8HiqTyN + https://imgur.com/a/0Jw1Aev + https://imgur.com/a/T66XsBh
[3] https://imgur.com/a/piDFurj
[4] https://imgur.com/a/6EZQvlK
[5] https://imgur.com/a/HByGLNJ
[6] https://imgur.com/a/s5hr8eu
[7] https://imgur.com/a/2GLS2Gt + https://imgur.com/a/GSJBV9m
@angstrom Kindly remove the warning again.
This comment really didn't fit in the previous thread, so I felt compelled to move it to its own thread
Can you give a rough translation/explanation for picture n4?
Hourly billing of worker hours? What are they, lawyers? These invoices give me massive PTSD.
Clouvider seems to be intentionally trying to act like a big hosting provider with no heart for their customers.
Where’s the popcorn? 🍿
Update: I’ve just re-read the post and saw the screenshots.
@Clouvider
First 2 and last one say "Payment failed" because of the daily limit on the account. The other 2 are charges of 2334 EUR, 5837 EUR and 1167 EUR that succeeded. Ouch.
Yes. We always paid the quartlery invoice of £12738.7 via bank transfer due to the high amount. However, we still had our Credit Card added for paying the abuse tickets (15 GBP per abuse). As we didn't pay the last invoice, they attempted to charge the full amount from our card which failed, so they charged multiple small amounts. Looks shady and obviously is shady imo. After confronting them, they said they had our authorisation for charging the CC (which they did indeed, for the abuse tickets) [1], but anyway shady imo.
First two notifications say "Limit reached, payment failed", following by 3 notifications saying "Payment of XX€ completed" and the last one, again "Limit reached, payment failed".
[1] https://imgur.com/a/9epvrPb
My guessing is that they got fed up with the constant abuse you / your users generated and decided if they have to get rid of you at some point might as well try to milk you as much as possible.
Scummy thing? Probably.
Surprised? Noone.
What was this volume? Thousands? Hundreds?
"roughly 5 abuse mails per week" is what OP wrote in their post.
... on 40 dedicated servers. That's literally nothing.
@Clouvider keeps giving innit?
Checked again for a precise reply. We have received a total amount of 350 abuse tickets for 24 months of service [1], which results in 14 abuses per month or ~4.2 per week. Not sure if this a lot, or not, considering we had 40 deidcated servers with a total of 1280 IPs. Decide on your own.
//Edit:
They also forwarded the most useless abuse reports [2] (I can find ton of them), I guess, because every Abuse report they forwarded to us generated them 15 GBP.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/H84Mav5 (from Proton which lists 50 mails per page)
[2] https://i.imgur.com/gD9vzie.png
It could have been 500-1000 too, and should not have mattered because all they needed to do was to forward it to you - another hosting provider - to handle they abuse accordingly. i.e.: by suspeding your customer's services.
So I'm not really sure what more Clouvider even has to do with the abuse emails that they start charging you for it. But someone do enlighten me because I do not run a hosting company so..
@emgh add 15 bucks per forwarded abuse reports charge to your future hosting business.
Good extra income indeed.
With a fuller response coming once we have time to re-familiarise ourselves with the matter from 3 years ago, if I remember correctly, before yet another attack on our brand is allowed to take off, it would be cool to provide interim background regarding the DDoS attacks OP was sending from his services or ultimately allowing their Customers to send them, as well as the fact that the abuse was just moving around OPs IPs as the OP services were advertised in hack forums as bulletproof VMs.
I think that might have been the trigger for us, but I will check.
Chat what is this
What’s the connection? If they abused your services you just terminate their services and kick them out.
Instead you milked them by charging 15 GBP per abuse email and tried to charge them in tricky methods.
I believe the OP asked to keep the services and promised to take action and they’ve been certainly informed they are being charged.
Processing industrial scale of serious abuse reports is not free and there’s a limit how much time you can give to somebody.
Honestly, I’m not comfortable providing a response without re-reading all the correspondence, as opposed to the selective screenshots provided here.
I just wanted to provide a background so you know who the OP is.
Then let's not try to provide any backgrounds of who OP is if you haven't re-familiarized yourself with this case. Just come back when you did.
So TLDR is OP was doing scummy business and you treated them like a scum. Understood.
Looking forward to full answer once it’s ready
I understand that you can't share it, but I'd love to see how the services was actually advertised. Wording makes a huge difference here. It's the difference between inviting clients to send attacks and just being a victim of the abuse themselves as well.
Company responses should never start like this.
@labze Does Hetzner charge you per abuse report? The only people I've seen that charge per abuse report are Cognet, and they should certainly not be taken as an example.
Keep in mind they provided 0 proof on their end. OP was pretty open and honest for being who Cloudvider claims they are, imo.
I find this fascinating. Based on the wording, I'll assume you knew that while the abuse reports were coming in. Why charge per abuse report instead of dropping him as a client? Did you just start charging him per abuse report because you knew he had a shit ton of money from alleged "bulletproof hosting"?
To be clear I just wanted to TLDR of what Clouvider implied. I don’t know OP neither what they did on the servers. I didn’t meant any personal comment on OP.
Apologies if I wasn’t clear on this.
I'm not sure I agree this is shady. A local hotel of mine will often do this when a user breaks their policy (no smoking fee). They try to charge the full amount, and if it fails they will charge smaller amounts. Money is owed after all.
From an accounts pov, it is shady. You've an invoice, and you'll charge as per invoice. You can not increase/decrease/pay in parts of that invoice. If anything needs to change, you'll be required to change the whole invoice itself (cancel the old one and generate a new one with the changes).
Just because the user didn't pay, it doesn't give the provider to charge a custom amount. This is what those scammers in the phone calls do when they see that the high value transactions are not going through. It is very scummy action.
I’m not sure a partial payment is wrong accounting wise. Also not sure a new invoice is needed.
I’d personally book the income for the date of the invoice issuing. Full amount.
Credit sold services full amount
Debit accounts receivable full amount
By date of the partial payment:
Debit bank account or whatever by the amount paid
Credit accounts receivable by the amount paid
An invoice isn’t a payment. An invoice is just an outstanding claim. Settling this claim in accounting world does not have to be a single transaction
Obviously above probably varies by country but above is the basics of double entry accounting
That's my takeaway from this as well.
Probably had an idea from the advertisement and prices being charged, compared to what they were paying, and realised the customer has plenty of cash and would likely just pay. An easy cash cow.
So in my mind, what the customer was using the services for is irrelevant as Clouvider knew, but didn't care enough to outright suspend them or tell them to leave (why limit their servers and not just tell them outright?)
Our business is definitely not scummy, it is privacy-focused but we definitely do not advertise our VMs as "bulletproof" on any site and never did. This is just false assumptions. The business is run under a German company (GmbH) for 5 years and complies with all local laws.
If you did a background check on us and were well aware of where we advertised our services, why even keep us as customer for such a long time and not issue a permanent termination? Instead, you charged per abuse report, and randomly increased the "Virtual Router and Firewall" from 400 GBP to 1200 GBP.
In the end it doesn't even matter, whether you consider our business shady or not, eventually you wanted to get rid of us as customer for the industrial amount of abuse reports (lol), which we eventually complied to, but you still forced us into a renew of another 3 months and took the 6k GBP for 0 days of service.
Also on that, if OP had 40 servers with them, there's no reason they all have to be paid in one transaction just because that's how they'd been done before. Could be one transaction. Could be 3. Could be 10. Could be 40. Could be more.
But anyway, when I first read the OP I very much agreed they'd been wronged. Especially this line "After more harrassment, they started to throttle all our servers to 10 Mbps and just said to fuck off in a nice way" suggests that Clouvider had asked them to leave when seemingly they hadn't.
And the smoking gun:
I was definitely on their side at this point, until after Clouvider's reply and then re-reading the OP, it's clear that they hadn't been asked to leave at all, they had just assumed it. They were throttled until the abusing service was dealt with (presumably OP just suspending the offending VM(s) would have been sufficient to get the throttling lifted) and then chose not to continue using the service, but didn't inform the provider.
I can see both sides of the issue here - Clouvider was in the right to attempt to take payment for an overdue invoice, for a service that was still active because the customer had never cancelled it. They arguably did the right thing by giving a 50% discount, even though by the terms of the contract they didn't have to.
I can also see the OP's frustration both at being throttled after already paying an extra fee for every abuse report, and at being charged for a service they didn't intend using any more. However, I do also think they already got a good outcome as it was their mistake in not cancelling that lead to the problem. Maybe the only better outcome for them would have been pro-rata'd based on date it was settled to end of the billing period, but even then that would have been goodwill rather than required by the contract.