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How many clients do they claim to have?
I’m not going to get into personal attacks, but since it was mentioned — last year I unfortunately had some serious family issues to deal with. I lost one parent and the other required life-saving surgery and needed 24-hour care afterwards, which I was responsible for providing.
During that time my priority was understandably my family. The filing was completed and the company remains in good standing.
I’d prefer to keep discussions focused on the hosting services rather than personal circumstances.
I do not see any need to provide any further input on this, everything that requires to be said has already been stated.
If anyone has a genuine issue, you are welcome to send in a ticket.
It's not a personal attack to point out that a company filed it's accounts late but I'm sorry to hear that.
Take care and I hope this year is a better one for you.
It is actually explained on the Stripe website how to prevent/limit this.
High chances you will, same thing happened with me, no emails regarding the kyc and whatnot and wham account suspended for KYC purposes. Start migrating now if you don't want to deal with another surprise headache.
This provider loves introducing KYC on customers by changing the rules; however did this provider send email notification previously to all their customers to notify and offer a grace period for these new rules which clearly impacted existing customers?
What is this referring to?
The company providing the services.
That would likely count as an unconscionable contract and be invalidated.
Again, such things count as unconscionable contracts and do not hold up in court. The real reason no one is going to do anything about it is because no one is going to jump through multiple jurisdictions just to be awarded nominal damages.
anything for 3.50 anything for 3.50
So.... is the end nigh? Should this one have provider tag removed because of not honouring paid contracts?
I'm trying to figure out what to do - i bought this a few months back because i was getting nervous about my Visual Web Technologies lifetime. Haven't yet migrated stuff but I probably won't now. I've had my IDs been rejected randomly on ID checks and almost lost an apartment over it because they used a third party KYC that couldn't figure out what was wrong and had to beg them to manually go over it. Thankfully they did and was able to get the apartment but these third party KYCs with no recourse is an increasingly terrifying and bad situation to be in. Since I just bought it I may be within the chargeback window. Haven't yet gotten an email to KYC just to prepare myself to do so. Maybe Xhosts will see the light here.
this would be my first time doing KYC for a hosting provider and it makes me feel insecure about the service. because if they are able to change the terms like this, who's to say they wouldn't do so again, or force me to do KYC again with another company years down the line after passing the first one that I then fail after migrating everything over?
i had seen that xhosts got really good reviews before all this. it's just such a shame. I know lifetimes can be a gamble but I didn't feel this way while seeing Xhost's reviews and reputation at the time.
I almost feel like at this point getting users to pay an additional one time fee would be less problematic than KYC
Yes, hetzner's verification system declined my ID although it was correct, so they did a manual verification and approved my account. Thats how KYC should be done!
Glad to see there are companies who will do this because this has happened to me for more important things than just hosting (see my post above). I've heard about it happening to people who need to get approved for more serious things such as tax or financial stuff and lose access to their money. There should always be a way to manually verify
Walk-in KYC as it should be
5 pages for 3€
Lol
I think they're shooting themselves in the foot because they didn't realize how abuse their lifetime plans would attract, which puts their partnership as a reseller in jeopardy. But they also aren't realizing that their reaction, while not ill-intentioned, is damaging their reputation specifically for the reason you say: It's making customers feel insecure and anxious due to uncertainty.
I'm personally going to avoid the services they are reselling, but I remain cautiously optimistic about the services run on their own hardware. It's a lot harder to get kicked out of a datacenter than a reseller package. If I do get a demand for KYC though, I'll just leave. I'm not going to give my government information to a random low-end host.
I think I've already had to verify through stripe before so they have or had my data at some point and they're better than some of the Palantir backed or shadier seeming ones. Does look like the Provider also gets a copy but it's unclear to me if this ends up on their servers that easily or if it's just something they can view in Stripe, seems like some providers were unaware they could even be viewed at all.
For me it's a slippery slope type issue. The terms changed already. So maybe a year from now I need to KYC AGAIN with a worse provider, or I get flagged for "abuse" because they're trying to weed out the lifetime plans.
I'm really unlucky I bought this when I did, got to be the worst value I ever got for a lifetime plan as it's less than 2 months already
i get that it's a tough situation with the reseller services and I don't think xhosts means any ill will. but it just seems like it could have been handled much much better than this. I guess lucky that I was lazy and hadn't migrated anything over yet
I don't want to charge back for this but I feel really ripped off because i didn't sign up for this - if I did so would this affect my reputation with other low end hosts? I know there was some sort of fraud list that they would put customers on etc
I am not trying to avoid KYC, but why should I be penalized because the company they willingly chose to process the verification cannot read my documents? I do understand that they don't have control over Stripe's results, and they don't even see the submitted documents, but there are no exceptions or even an option for a manual review?
I have completed KYC with multiple other companies and have never faced such a hassle. They always accepted my documents right away. Only one company did not accept them and asked for a translated version of my ID instead. So I paid a registered office to officially translate it and sent it to them, and they approved my KYC without any issues.
Meanwhile @xHosts:

I can't see how stripe will verify my ID though.
Govt. documents in India are not given to third parties except aadhar even during which, you will require my consent. Not sure a non indian company can request for aadhar authentication from UIDAI.
So obviously it SHOULD fail. At this point, I'll be more worried if i do pass because how the hell stripe verified my ID (in case they did). And if they CAN verify my data, how did they get the backend verification.
They never did the same for me, so I guess you were lucky.
You do not have to do it, do you know? There are plenty of other providers. At least, that is what I would do, if I receive a KYC request.
Actually, they can see the submitted documents. When you give your info to Stripe, you're also giving it to whatever random low-end provider you're using. They get to see it all through the Stripe dashboard, not just a simple "pass"/"fail" result as some people seem to think.
Just received this,
Whats goodwill here??
That's certainly better than nothing, and it looks like they are trying to take the criticism to heart, but for it to actually help anyone, they should assist people in verifying if Stripe is unable to verify them for any reason. If the customer has already paid, it's on xHosts to either refund them or find a way to get them verified (assuming their information is legitimate and the issue is on Stripe's end).
Nothing is more upsetting to a customer than following the ToS perfectly and being willing to verify, sending all their necessary documents, just to get kicked out without refund over something that is not their fault. Terminating someone because Stripe does not support their country is no different than terminating someone because you can't access AbuseIPDB to see if your customer got your IP blacklisted.
I haven't received above mail nor received any mail regarding KYC verification. There is only 2 days left.
What should I do @xHosts
So people who for whatever reason didn't do the KYC, whether because they are just lazy, opposed to sharing their ID documents or because they know they used fake details are given another chance, but people with legitimate ID that Stripe won't verify aren't. That's not goodwill.
I could understand refusing to start provision for someone who fails KYC, but stopping an existing service without any indication of TOS violation and someone who's prepared to submit genuine documents just seems ridiculous. This latest development doesn't change that.
And besides, I don't know how rushed the original process was (but guessing at least a month), to have this extension poorly announced with a 2 day deadline (actually from the above, some people are being given until Monday, some until Tuesday) is even more stupid.
They just need to full refund all the affected customers. After all, they're losing a service that is still promised to last their lifetime, so you can't pro-rata it. And if the provider is to be believed the cost of verification is 2/3 the cost of the service, so anybody who's not doing the verification is saving them money. The need to just refund everybody and chalk it up to a learning experience in running a company.
dead horse. i don't buy webhosting but even from the sidelines this brand is toast. grab your shit and run. he said he was prorating refunds to annuals, if you were a lifetime chalk it up as a lesson and skip a cup of coffee today to break even.
I think this thread is a pretty good guide to the mistakes to avoid when you want to perform mass KYC on your (existing) customers, and using only one verification service with no manual review for unsupported countries is quite unusual aswell.