My *PAID FOR* Account is Suspended

[pano]

This is ridiculous, I go out of town to a convention and you shut down all of my accounts?

It says my email address is bad and my phone is disconnected. My email address is not bad, just full because I went out of town!

My phone is disconnected because I moved to a new house and phone service here just got connected yesterday. My account is paid for, it should not have been suspended unless payment was denied. You billed my ccard on April 8th, you have your money, but I have no account.

Sometimes, it seems Vortech just doesn't have much concern for their customers. I run a fan club of over 1700 members, I may ask all 1700+ members to write Vortech individually and express their discontent with a policy that suspends service on PAID accounts. I cannot even begin to tell you how upset I am with Vortech right now! If you do not receive payment, well then suspend the account...otherwise, leave my customers alone!!!

Jim

[electricfox]

that does sound pretty messed up.

[pano]

Yes, it is very messed up

And what's worse is all of my customers have a "Account has been suspended" sign instead of their website...which of course looks horrible to their visitors/customers and makes me appear unprofessional.

I called billing, it's after 10am eastern time but they have yet to crawl out of bed it seems.

This should never have happened. If the email bounces and/or the phone number is unavailable, allow the account to continue until funds are depleted. Do not simply shut down all of the accounts and throw up account suspended signs. That is probably the single most unprofessional move I have seen Vortech make and, imho, strongly reflects their attitude towards their own customers.

UPDATE: I just received an email saying my account has been resumed, yet "Account for domain planet-zeppelin.com has been suspended" still replaces what should be a website. Sadly though, even once it is actually resumed, the damage has already been done. Hopefully, this post will make others aware of this unethical and dangerous practice.

Jim

pano, I am not sure what happened, but sometimes accounts go over the credit limit because of adding services, such at coldfusion, and the card needs to be charged, as for bouncing emails, if your domain is set up in a control panel, we are nto the ones hosting that domain, it will use the local DNS to send to that email, which results in problems, because that domain isn't one your are checking/have the address set up on, people really need to use a third party email contact for billing issues, and tech tickets replies, it HELPS more than anyone would know.

As for the phone number, I don't have much tosay there, but this has happened with many other hosts I have seen gripes about similar issues with, if the info is not kept current, we can't contact you and there are problems. I understand if it was only a day or two, and it is unfourtunate that it happened, but if it had been a while it was your responsibility to change it sooner.

Note: I am not in billing, I don't know exactly what happened here, just expressing my opinion in this matter.

[pano]

Thx for the post landi.

The ccard was charged, no probs there. The email address was a third party as it should be, it had filled up because I was in Toronto for a week. I could not update my phone number because I had yet to receive my new number - until I returned from Toronto.

The point is that, for various reasons, a person may be unable to be contacted for short periods of time. That should be understood. If the account becomes unpaid or the account owner can not be reached for extended periods of time, then it seems prudent to temporarily suspend the account.

Brad has been generous and has credited my account to compensate. However, I'm afraid this does little to compensate in reality. I will be spending the morning trying to explain the suspension to others.

The timing could not have been worse. The convention I just returned from was sponsored by the members of the club that is now shut down. We had a booth there to spread the word about our club...which is now suspended.

A real estate agent that is a customer of mine has just partnered with a broker and is trying to convince him to use my company instead of his current webmaster/hosting. It appears I may have lost that account. These are professional people that cannot afford to be taken down over something this silly.

As of this post, my sites are still showing a "Suspended" sign

Jim

Don't think there is much else I can say, I am sorry this happened, and hopefully the control panel being up/down isn't keeping the sites from being unsuspended properly, If you send me a PM I will check them on my end and see what I get.

[pano]

To update everyone, my sites are now back online. I pm'd landiserve and thanked him for his concern.

Jim

[admin]

pano, I also ok a month credit for the issue and have talked to billing about the issue to try and keep this from happening to any one else.. I looks very bad when emails don't work and then your phone is off.. They use to give 3 days in this case but I am going to make it 5 to 7 days not to give a little more time on issues like this.

Sorry about the problem..

[pano]

Thanks Brad

Jim