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[Poll] Can a supplier terminate a service contract because of a negative customer review?
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More the merrier
Always welcome!
Let's invite @Jord . He likes it when his carrot gets nibbled on.
@cxplay You definitely should have done something to ensure people are voting not based only on what they think is right. For example:
Otherwise a lot of people are going to vote no because they don't think a provider should do that (i.e. "shouldn't be allowed to get away with it") even if they would otherwise vote yes begrudgingly because they believe a provider technically can get away with it.
Providers can,
But they should not.
You can do anything although sometimes at most once. But as a consumer, I don't think they should over a bad review, especially without a refund on the remaining service.
I agree with @MannDude that, if there's a serious incompatibility between business and customer, they should be shown the door but only with a prorated refund. That's the only way to keep everyone more-or-less happy.
I start having problems with it if once the provider keeps the money after a mere disagreement. But a refund is fair.
You are "word playing" here trying to imply that they WANT to keep the service. It is similar to how tenant are forced to live in the house even after relationship with landlord goes sour. There are multiple reason leading to it:
I think it's too late, and voting is simply a matter of principle of "yes" or "no", and complicating the choice would lead to the inability to investigate people's first reactions, and I just wanted to know exactly what the members of LowEndTalk would say when they saw such a question at first. Still, I appreciate your advice.
I'm not "word playing", I'm asking a simple question.
If the service is so bad that it deserves the worst possible review and stirring up shit about the provider on a forum, why would any customer still want to use them when the provider tries to drop them? The simple answer is that the service is still good enough for the customer's purposes and didn't deserve that review.
BTW, the points you are trying to use to prove me wrong, I myself made on page 1, before you started arguing with me: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/4772146/#Comment_4772146
and the simple solution to all of these: if you are genuinely unhappy with the service that's been provided, move your shit to some other server and then write your terrible review.
You think the service is unusable, so if the provider cancels the service and gives a refund (and let's be clear, I've been arguing the full refund case from the absolute beginning of this thread), then the customer hasn't lost out at all.
If you are incapable of moving your stuff to another server, then you probably shouldn't be managing a server at all. You should have your own backups in place, so that even if your provider had a catastrophic server failure, the maximum you should lose is a day of data. Whether a server is shut down from a failure or in response to a customer action is irrelevant in terms of data loss.
If you don't have backups, write a terrible review and get cancelled by your provider, and then you realise you don't have a data recovery plan, then frankly you are an idiot.
One can be an idiot and the customer of a badly-behaving provider at the same time. The two are not mutually-exclusive.
We shouldn't have to be paranoid about a paid provider cancelling us over our opinions of them.
I still don't get why you guys think getting a full refund and getting to walk away from a provider you hate is such a bad outcome. You'd rather no refund and staying with a provider you hate?
As I said just five posts ago, I think it's not nearly as bad if you get a full (or prorated) refund. The primary issue I have is if the provider keeps the money. I still think it's creates a chilling effect, but it's not quite as serious.
I'd rather option 3: Staying with a provider that I paid money for. There are a few providers I use that I would rate poorly, but I would not like to be terminated by them for saying so. Of course, when/if I review them, it's not going to be an MJJ-style "0/10 scam stay away!!!" but will have a detailed list of the issues I have, what I tried to do to get the issues resolved, how the provider could have done better, and who, if anyone, I would recommend the service for.
Because time is also money. The service that is running could break when server is switched off out of nowhere. Hourly backup may not be possible due to sync of various services and hence back up may not cover all transactions.
Why do you think time is not an important factor here?
To be clear, this is exactly what I meant by "no refund and staying with a provider you hate".
Got it. Then it really depends on why I hate the provider and what my workload is. If it's truly awful and completely prevents me from doing my work, I'll ask for a refund and hope the provider is willing to provide it, knowing that it's on me for not reading reviews first and/or trying it out by paying monthly.
And in the context of this thread, answering the question that was posed, this is in the situation where the service was so bad that the customer has already written an awful review about the provider and they're cancelling the service. If they get a full refund, that's the perfect outcome for the customer, surely?
The only party that loses out is the provider, who's provided the service for free, wasted hours on support, and suffered reputational damage from the review.
The question was just about terminating an account due to a bad review without mentioning whether or not a refund is provided. I agree that a refund (not a full one, just a prorated refund) would make it far less problematic, but if the customer wants to keep what they paid for, the provider should provide it for them.
If the customer hates it, it should be up to them whether or not they leave. It's not up to you, me, or the provider to decide why a customer chooses to stay with a provider that they rate poorly.
Example: I have a VeloxMedia VPS. It hasn't been cancelled. I would like to keep that VPS. The performance is fine, the specs are nice, and I already paid for it. I also wrote a 1 star review of them on TrustPilot. Do you think it was wrong of me to do that? Do you think it would be just if they were to then terminate my VPS?
That's the entire point of a review: You tell others your opinion of the provider's reputation. A bad review damaging their reputation means the review is working as designed.
Otherwise, who gets to decide if a negative review is legitimate? Or should negative reviews just never be made?
Then switch before shooting your mouth off about the provider and giving them a reason to terminate the contract.
Firstly, that's a sunk cost - it's the cost of doing business with any provider. If you want to change provider, then you'll be doing that anyway. (And again, if you don't want to change, don't shit on the provider with a bad review, it's really that simple).
Secondly, good luck finding any service that will compensate for your time in any dispute. Even the most generous terms you'll find anywhere are about refunding, or very rarely for breaches of SLA for additional free days/weeks/months of service.
It sounds like you're saying that any action that harms a provider's reputation, even if it's legitimate and involves nothing more than an honest review, is a bad action to make and should not be done.
If you were only saying "you should be aware that some providers are scummy and will retaliate against you", then I'd agree.
Again, the question I keep asking - why does a customer want to keep a service so badly, that they're telling others is terrible and you shouldn't buy. If a full refund is given, but the customer refuses it because they want to stay, that's equivalent to making the choice to pay for the service again (actually, it's stronger than that, because they'd be getting back more than a pro-rata refund). That doesn't make sense rationally in the context of having written a public review saying nobody should use their service.
And it is up to them whether they post a review which has the likelihood of causing an outcome that they don't want.
It depends what you mean by "just".
IIRC they have cancelled anybody they could identify wrtiting bad reviews, you "got lucky" and slipped through the net.
For sure, I'd say that they deserved the 1-star review. I'd also say, for sure, if they offered a full refund and cancellation, you'd be an idiot not to take it.
I believe their ToS did contain a provision covering this case, so yes I think they would have been able to terminate your service as a result of a poor review. And, as I've said countless times in this thread AND that thread, the solution is to give a full refund.
I have answered this question several times already in this thread.
That was already answered. But it doesn't matter; It's entirely up to the customer.
And I agree that they likely have the legal right to do so, but it appears to me like you are framing this not as "at what point does it become illegal" but as an innocent business having their reputation harmed by someone and rightfully terminating them, as if it is wrong for someone to write a bad review.
That's not quite what I'm saying.
I'm saying if you go out of your way to harm someone's business, they might be inclined to retaliate against you. Especially if they are a small business, and a review has disproportionally more effect on them that a large business, especially if you go out of your way to harass them in their primary advertising space, especially if they've already spent hours trying to help you for an issue that was ultimately not their fault, especially if you're doing it just because you are leaving a bad review just to try to get a refund that is explicitly against their advertised procedures.
The larger a company gets, the less they'll care about individual reviews. But attacking a one-man band, for sure they're going to get upset if you set out to sabotage their livelihood.
So you mean more than just writing an honest review, but also taking extra steps to damage them? E.g. spamming their advertising threads with "this guy is a scammer!!1one" or creating multiple reviews from alt accounts?
There are very few honest reviews in this world. The vast majority are customers venting because something they wanted didn't quite go their way and they want to lash out.
I'm not saying it's not possible for an honest review to exist.
What I am saying though, is that if you leave a bad review, and if it pisses off the business owner, and if they have a term in their ToS saying they can terminate the contract for any reason, and even more if they specify that harming their business or operations in any way is grounds to terminate, then you should expect that leaving a bad review might also lead to termination of the contract.
Obviously the more you try to hurt a provider, especially a small business, the more inclined they will be to retaliate or drop you as a customer, especially if the contract provides an easy way for them to do so.
Indeed, but it's a trend that worse companies get worse reviews, even if there is a lot of noise. I highly doubt Advin Servers has a higher rating than C1V simply because C1V happened to get unlucky with venting customers.
OK, with that I agree.
Absolutely, the provider may be justified for terminating an account because of a bad review. At the end of the day, who suffers the most damage - the provider or someone with an anonymous user name?
Do you believe providers should not suffer reputation damage under any circumstances?
If a provider is really crappy, what is wrong with writing a negative review?
The entire point of reviews is to show the reputation of a business, positive or negative. If the business is good, it will have more positive reviews than negative. It's not a perfect system as people are more likely to write a review if they are upset than if they are satisfied, but that's an orthogonal problem.
Maybe. I just looked at OVH on trustpilot. Only 6805 reviews out of who knows how many tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of customers over the years. 47% 5 star, 50% 1 star.
Advinservers, only 57 reviews out of who knows how many hundreds, maybe thousands of customers. 70% 5 star, 16% 4 star, 9% 1 star.
I'd say the 1 star reviews for both providers are unfair and not representative of the service across their user base.
And now look at Velox media. Only 21 reviews, of at least thousands claimed by Eric. 38% 5 star, 57% 1 star.
That's not far from the ratio for OVH, and yet objectively they are very, very different in terms of quality.
Looking at those reviews, you instinctively know that they only represent a tiny subset of users, usually those that are unhappy, so the big ones like OVH you think "well, they can't be that bad, they have tens of thousands of customers" but for the small company you think "well, that's half the reviews are negative, I'd better keep away from them". And in the case of Veloxmedia, you'd be right, but it only required 12 negative reviews to give you that negative sentiment.
Going back to C1V, they actually only have 57 reviews, 63% 5 star and 32% 1 star. That's 19 negative reviews, from a company of similar size to Veloxmedia. There's a lot to be critical of C1V for sure, but that's more people leaving negative reviews than Veloxmedia. Which company is worse? One that's trying their best, just quite badly, or one that was literally an exit-scam from the very beginning? From the ratings, they look pretty much the same.
Just to repeat it again, a negative review of a small company harms them a lot. Sometimes that's justified, but usually it's not.
The problem is that having one bad experience that wasn't resolved exactly to your liking is rarely equivalent to the provider being really crappy.