New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Issue with $60 payment to Inception Hosting, now resolved
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
@angstrom is issue with removing Clouvider from the title is that Inception Hosting is no more, clients are transfered to Clouvider. Their ways (Clouvider, I assume parent company?) of treating clients shouldn’t be hard to find as a potential client reading LET. It’s about offering value to readers IMO.
Just my 2c.
They, IMO, blurred the line between Inception and Clouvider long ago, and they made sure the line was completely erased when a refund wasn’t possible but a transfer of credits between the two companies was.
2c?
EUR? USD? GBP? SEK? OR MAYBE DKK?
Non-refundable account credits.
subscribe
thats a serious allegation
Do it or don’t but don’t comment stuff like that without proof IMO
You are LET, here it's only ratcredit
This is what I’m thinking too. It seems like they’ve acknowledged that Inception is a part of them, and they’re essentially “one” entity that can transfer credits. At the same time they are stating that they’re different entities by refusing refunds (which apparently now refunded due to goodwill).
My personal experience with Clouvider was great though (in terms of the VPS box itself). Shame that they could’ve handled this better.
Now you have to make a thread after an accusation like that
with only 3 comments he could be a troll
I've issued a warning to this guy
The old title reflected the thread's contents more accurately.
I'm not sure that I understand what you're trying to say
As I understand it, until January 15th, Clouvider is the parent company, and Inception Hosting is a daughter company of Clouvider
This thread concerns Inception Hosting, in particular, the refund policy of Inception Hosting (which may not be the same as the refund policy of Clouvider)
You guys all keep mentioning Clouvider, but the issue of this thread concerns/concerned Inception Hosting
Also:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is any client of Inception Hosting (automatically) transferred to Clouvider after January 15th? This wasn't my impression
(I left Inception Hosting over a year ago, so I didn't receive the email regarding the closing of Inception Hosting, so I can't check)
@angstrom if I start Host A, do a bunch of questionable things, and rebrand to Host B (no I won't go all the way to Host-C in my examples), can't Host B be mentioned in any thread titles in regards to what I've done? Since it was actually called Host A by the time of the incidents?
Or do I need two different legal entities to circumvent consequences for my actions? Where do we draw the line exactly?
And no, you're right. Not automatically. There was still a very clear migration path set out though with the email and the promo codes etc. Not to mention a credit transfer between the companies being easier than a refund.
@emgh As fascinating as these abstract/schematic examples/puzzles are (maybe), I still don't quite understand what you're trying to say, as far as Inception Hosting versus Clouvider is concerned
In particular, there's no rebranding -- at least no rebranding in the usual marketing sense -- that has taken place (or will take place, for that matter)
Inception Hosting is a daughter company of Clouvider that will close on January 15th, and no customer is automatically transferred to Clouvider (as you also acknowledge)
Regarding:
Which consequences for whose actions does who want to circumvent?
That definitely didn't happen, at least for me.
As far as I can tell, Inception Hosting continued to be run as a completely separate entity with no migration of customers, customer details or anything else. I had to create a brand new account with Clouvider to redeem my promo codes.
The generated codes could feasibly be used to retroactively link the accounts together, but it seems like Inception Hosting has just said "we have N active services, please issue N identical promo codes".
I'd also add, that I'm extremely happy with the service at Clouvider so far, and with the lifetime 50% promo code it's arguably better value than I had an Inception Hosting. For a very marginal increase in price, I've got a much better CPU, double the RAM and nearly double the NVMe. I've had one interaction with support so far, and the ticket I raised as low priority was handled within an hour.
EDIT: should clarify that I consolidated 2 services together and picked the next size server up from the total cost of the old 2 services together, about 25% higher cost. I could have chosen the smaller option, which would have been more comparable specs wise at 40% less than the original cost. Of course, if you only had 1 service at the minimal spec, then the migration option would have cost you 25% more but given you a much better spec.
Damages to Clouvider's reputation for actions caused by them as an effect of their accusition of Inception.
As you know, any person/user/customer can decide to blame a parent company for a misstep -- let's call it a misstep -- that is made by a daughter company of the parent company
The question is whether or to what extent the blame is warranted/justified, but this is not always so easy to resolve
In the case of the issue raised by the OP of this thread, I see that Inception Hosting had a direct role but I don't see a direct role played by Clouvider
One can always simply decide/stipulate that any misstep by a daughter company is ipso facto also a misstep by the parent company, and in an extended sense this may be true, but if we're trying to understand what went wrong where, it's much more useful to begin locally (here: at Inception Hosting) than to run immediately to the top (here: to Clouvider)
Well luckily, in 4 days there will be no more Inception Hosting, and Cloudiver won't be able use Inception Hosting excuses for their great customer support.
These aren't huge companies though, the people working for IH are the same people working for Clouvider, aren't they? So poor customer service by one is poor customer service by both.
Add to that whoever uses the Clouvider account here (Dominik?) actively trashing Clouvider's reputation and there's clearly a problem with the company.
One thing I've noticed in this thread that surprises me, even when I know that at least one of the people I'm thinking of runs a company themselves, is the belief that when a company acquires another that they are automatically merged together.
That may happen eventually, but it's not how most acquisitions work, at least not initially, and certainly not automatically.
The acquisition of a company by another simply means that company A now owns 100% of the shares of company B, and therefore receives 100% of the profit issued by dividends.
Under UK tax law, if company A owns 51% or more of the shares of company B, the dividends it receives are exempt from company A's corporation tax. This is fair, because company B has already paid corporation tax on those profits.
As of April 2023, there are additional rules to do with reducing the thresholds on corporation tax of "associated companies" (which means where multiple companies effectively have the same people in majority control) that were re-introduced when the corporation tax rate was changed from a flat 19% to 19% below £50k and 25% above £250k and a sliding scale in between. The reason for this is to prevent tax avoidance by just creating lots of small companies below the lower threshold, but has the side effect of increasing the tax burden on the larger company if the majority shareholders also control a smaller company.
Otherwise, those companies remain entirely independent, unless there is a deliberate action to transfer assets between them. Even if that is done, they'd have to be properly accounted for in both companies records and for a justifiable reason.
It's not entirely reasonable to assume, especially given that there doesn't appear to have been any sharing of customer details from IH to C, that Clouvider bought IH solely to leave it chugging along doing its own thing and making a little extra profit without much input from them. There'd be no particular reason to change something that works without interference, until the tax changes last year would increase Clouvider's corporation tax bill, possibly by more than IH was even making in profit, at which point it's a fairly easy business decision to just kill it off.
They probably thought that by offering a really good transition path to a better service at almost the same price that everyone would be totally happy with the transition. It's just seems a shame that seemingly only a very few cock ups in support has created such bad will. Let's face it, out of all the customers they had, there were only 2 people here who actually had issues. Everyone else has just piled on based on the way these cases were handled badly by support.
that's so funny
Right
As you know, there's sometimes a not-so-healthy tendency, especially here on LET, for some (but happily not all) users to unreflectingly blow out of proportion what was (in this thread) at the end of the day a minor misstep (now resolved)
Do you wish to elaborate?
Congrats on your first post
Honestly the only reason I clicked on this thread was because of how the clouvider guy responded to the last thread. Always amusing to see people show their ass.
I don't imagine a handful of LET clowns (self included) opinion of the situation matters much and I'm sure something else will come up shortly and we'll move on.
I looked up their filed accounts last night on Companies House. You can't tell exactly what their revenue or profits are (those are in the full reports that are only shared with HMRC and the shareholders), but you can see the value of their assets, outstanding liabilities and creditors, and from that you can infer a bit about whether they're buying new assets and expected income "within one year" (but usually that's just whatever the next billing period is).
The older accounts show that when Clouvider first bought Inception Hosting, there were assets worth less than £3000, and in the first year after acquisition more assets were acquired worth £8000 in 2021, less than £200 in 2022 and £1600 in 2023. Those assets are now worth £4414 after depreciation.
The creditors falling within one year of £1839 and the deferred income of £1284 shows that Inception at the time of purchase had maybe £24000 turnover maximum per year. Clearly it wasn't generating much money, even though it was popular here and had good brand recognition.
The investment in the first year (coupled with a mysterious "amounts owed to group undertakings and other participating interests", so probably a loan from Clouvider to IH to fund the purchase of new hardware, etc, showed that Clouvider tried to help them grow as a separate brand - first first two years has "Other creditors" around £5000, which suggests that their turnover was at least doubled after the investment of new hardware.
But whatever, it's also clear that their last filed accounts that they only have £4000 in assets and the turnover has dropped off massively again, looks like below £20000 per year. At this point the company seems to be worth less than the debt due to "group activities", which I'm assuming is a loan from C to IH, and so closing it seems to be entirely reasonable. As I mentioned in a previous post, the changes to corporation tax last year also mean that just by IH existing, C is paying more in Corporation Tax that it otherwise would.
Also, looking at the account points strongly to the companies being run entirely separately and there being little to no influence exerted by Clouvider on how Inception was run, other than by (I'm guessing) providing a loan and encouragement to buy new hardware to try to develop the brand.
The other main change is that employees dropped from 1 to 0 when Clouvider took over, suggesting that Anthony was employed directly by Clouvider from that point. This is fairly standard in acquisitions as it gives the parent company the chance to renegotiate the contract, usually to require them to stay at the company for a certain period of time after the sale.
Alright, I promised the whole story. Not that there is much more meat to it, but here it is.
When I got the automated payment notification on Nov 11 from PayPal I was actually a little disappointed, I had been wanting to move to a larger VPS on black Friday but forgot to cancel the automatic payment.
So when the cancellation / company dissolution mail came in just hours later, I was actually in good spirits. I thought the whole matter would resolve itself in time and went on looking for offers on black Friday. (For what it's worth, I went with Layer7, transferred my servers over in the Christmas period and already hat one minor outage
. So we'll see how that goes.)
When on December 30 I got a refund for $2.30 instead of $60 I knew something was up.
I went through may statements looked up times and amounts, correlated them to their replies and opened up a ticket with all that detailed information.
From there on you all know the rest.
As to the Clouvider / InceptionHosting discussion that has been going on: As fast as I am concerned, a wholly owned subsidiary is little more than a department of the larger company. The parent company sets policy and has the power to order the subsidiary to do whatever the parent company sees fit. Usually the subsidiary doesn't have its own C-suite as well. So yes, I consider Clouvider responsible for anything InceptionHosting does and did in the last years.
P.S.: Just for the sake of completeness, while IH did now refund the whole $60 I paid on Nov 11 (by refunding me an additional $57.30 $57.70 (EDIT: Fixed amounts, see comments below)), they technically still owe me the $2.30 from the Nov'23 to Nov'24 payment period that now has not been refunded. But who's counting.
Yes, I’m well versed in company structure. I have to say though your UK tax laws seem awful. In Sweden, tax on dividends for holding companies is exempt almost always so long as the company is privately owned.
And no, I don’t believe that they’re merged together. I do believe though that management is the same. If they were ran completely separately, Inception wouldn’t be able to offer Clouvider credits. The support agent clearly has a role in Clouvider as well.
We can talk about corporate structures all day, but my point is that Clouvider is getting off easy because of legalities.
This isn’t some huge corporation with hundreds of staff.