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It must have been at least 1 day of service, or you'd have cancelled before the renewal date and so not owed anything.
Uhh, this is sickening.
You keep confirming my theory more and more. Could you be so kind to give your companies name?
You are missing that there are also other customers on that dedicated machine. This is not industry practice. If they wanted the abuse to stop, they would null route the IP the abuse is coming from.
You pay X for a provider's services. You are getting a regular, expected amount, of 4 abuse reports per week from 1200 VPSes, which is a very good abuse % considering the "privacy provider" part of OP's operation.
Your provider then starts charging you extortionate amounts per abuse reports, jacks up your prices for other stuff and makes operating your customers machines impossible. This is a very clear "please fuck off" message. Every single individual with a full working brain would understand what the provider wants to say.
Had to go and check how I paid for a clouvider black friday deal in the past, thank god it was crypto
CPA is a scummy system in the first place - far too difficult to cancel compared to e.g. direct debit. Any company abusing it, no matter the reason, is straight on the killdozer list
If this was just a case of sending in the debt collectors, we could call it a day with a bad review and no more money changing hands. But due to the abuse of CPA I want to see the OP receive a full refund, advertising on hackforums or not
Also requiring a customer to formally cancel a service that they are being constructively dismissed from is highly dubious behaviour
It depends on whether the invoice is prepaid or postpaid.
I believe the whole conversation depends on this:
Did OP give permission to Clouvider to charge the card for any invoice or only the abuse tickets? Was the distinction put in writing?
I mean, normally when you add a credit card to a (hosting providers) billing system, you don't define for what service exactly it can be used or not.
Generally speaking you allow to charge outstanding invoices from it, which would include non abuse related invoices as well.
How they do it isn't important. If you take what Clouvider said before that the problems came from a revolving set of IPs, it's not Clouvider's responsibility to play whack-a-mole and identify the problematic IPs, it's the OPs.
They could probably have null-routed the entire subnet, but instead they chose to throttle it, giving the OP the ability to log into the machine and identify and shut down the problematic VMs.
Sadly for you and your argument, that's not how the real world works.
If they wanted the customer to leave at the end of the billing period, they would have told the customer they had cancelled the contract. They didn't, as the OP has said. The OP admitted he made a false assumption.
By not cancelling the contract before the renewal date, they had then entered into another non-refundable period until the next renewal date. There's literally nothing to argue about here. The OP's not arguing it, why are you?
How many billing systems have you ever used where you can add a payment method and tick a box saying "please don't use my payment method if I owe you money"?
Aside from anything, imagine the outrage here if the opposite situation had occurred - the service hadn't been cancelled, the usual monthly bank payment didn't happen, customer had a payment method on file, but provider decided to just cancel their services instead of attempting taking payment. You know you'd be here stirring up trouble in that case, so what would you rather them do instead? Just provide services for free?
I like being a HATER on the world wide web, sorry.
This doesn't stop the abuse though, null routing the IP would.
Fair.
and in this context also prepare the other tickets, including those that the OP no longer has access to, and if necessary publish them here in addition.
if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
p.s. i can't see any attack on your brand. sometimes you are your own enemy.
Isn't that exactly what I've said?
in this context, it would be interesting to know how long customer data with whom you no longer have a business relationship can be lawfully stored.
Fair. And also I laughed a lot when I read this!
Fair.
If it'd been me, I'd probably have been tempted null-routed the lot until the OP had contacted via ticket and agreed they were going to immediately shutdown the problematic IPs. I would feel guilty about the fallout on their legitimate customers though, which is maybe why they just throttled instead.
Yeah, sorry - it looks like I replied to the wrong message!
5 per week on an account with a single server I could understand calling that "industrial scale of serious abuse reports" but on 40 servers, not so much.
Would you consider a customer with a single dedicated server generating one abuse report every other month "industrial"?
@Clouvider what kind of abuse report is this? https://imgur.com/gD9vzie
Is that what you received from the complainer? Or did your employees 'summarize' it?
That report is inactionable.
In the context of the GDPR - for as long as there's a justifiable business reason for keeping it, and it depends on the specific data.
Financial stuff might be required for at least 5 years in the UK, because you could be audited that far back. Particularly if there was a dispute involved, you might be justified in keeping it longer.
For chat logs and message history, I'd probably say shorter in general - if I've had a normal service with a provider, and then left uneventfully, I'd probably expect that all my data except their copies of invoices and their accounts to be probably deleted within 6 months. The recommendations are generally to not keep data longer than a month if you don't have any use for it.
However, in this case, where there's been complaints of abuse, maybe they have to keep them longer to respond to whoever raised the complaint (I actually have no idea). They might also have a record internally of problematic customers (in their eyes) so they can choose not to do business with them in the future. As long as they say that has value to the business, it could feasibly exist for years.
i was misquoted above! this statement was made by clouvider and not by me. just to be clear!
Sorry, not really sure how that happened.. Edited..
I believe there is a 30 day notice needed for cancellation
Without even reading thread I am ready to take piece of that 50% off coupons and onboard again. @Clouvider :😬
Honestly the facts seem to be clear:
You didn't cancel your contract. Clouvider charged you for it. Simple as that.
They can't rent out to other customers, since there is still a contract with you. So they are losing money. A contract is not automatically ending only because you don't pay.
I NEEDED THAT BOLD TEXT THANK YOU
@FREEK
The constructive dismissal behaviour from Clouvider makes it less clear cut than that. It would make an interesting lawsuit and I’m kind of surprised it didn’t become one
The lawyer fees (20-30k+) would be more than the disputed amount (6k). Lawsuits aren't just "oh yeah, lets file dis bitch".
unless customer happens to be a lawyer/attorney as well
What are you on about?
Constructive dismissal is about employment law. It has exactly zero relevance to the topic in hand.
Even as an analogy, it's a bad one. In constructive dismissal, an employer hopes that the employee resigns (voluntarily ends the contract) so that they don't have to pay redundancy pay. The analogy doesn't even relate as neither party ended the contract, and even if either of them had there wouldn't have been a penalty payable from either side.
The closest analogy would be booking a hotel and having a payment authorisation on your card instead of taking a deposit. When you don't show up, you get charged the first night as a cancellation fee, and it's taken from the pre-authorised transaction on your card.
Of course it’s an analogy. It’s the same behaviour from the provider/employer side, but not the same reason for doing so. Clouvider wanted to keep milking a bad customer or have them go elsewhere without directly firing them
On one side, as ralf said, they could have very well just done this. They should have done this based on their "these people are bulletproof hosters" accusation.
But yeah, they didn't want to, instead they wanted to milk the customer on abuse reports, firewall costs and whatever other bullshit they can make up. In this case, their reason for not letting the OP go is simply greed, not because they couldn't.
It's exactly that. The OP is wrong for not terminating their service, but they have admitted that. Cloudvider are technically entitled to that money, although it would have been more clear cut for them to say "Look, we saw your advertisement. We don't want that on our network. You have X amount of time to find a new provider and will be charged until then"
But instead they charge fees for abuse complaints, limit the network speeds, increase firewall costs or whatever, etc. trying to get the customer to stop using their services without outright telling them. Seems like a load of BS.
But I think what Cloudvider did here in general is very scummy behaviour IMO, cashing in instead of protecting their network. It's the same shit you see from regulators who are supposed to protect people.
Company A does something illegal and makes $100m, at the cost of customers/the public/whoever.
Regulator fines them $20m.
The company is happy because they still made a bunch of money. The regulators are happy because they got their cut. Everyone else just gets fucked over.