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For the last week I've been going around and around with my hosting provider, Arvixe, LLC. Lately their reponse to support tickets has been abysmal (10 days, no acknowledgement of my ticket), and I've seen some other things that started me looking for another hosting provider. My 2 year hosting contract was going to be up on Aug 31 of this year, so I started looking around. While I was searching for a new provider, two things happened - first, the server that my site was on went down - twice. This is unrelated to my original ticket. the first time the server went down, I submitted another ticket (to at least record the date that this happened, not really expecting a response) and the server was back up within several hours. The second time it went down a day or so later, well, it still hasn't come back up. I called support and told them there was no notification on their status page of any outages, so they said they'd put one up. This is apparently called a "network interruption". I saw another server was having a "network interruption" and it has been down since August 3rd - three weeks. I saw a dim future for my site at that point.
The second thing that happened is that Arvixe automatically renewed my 2 year hosting agreement. So, now I've spent a good deal of money for something that was not due yet (as I write this, the bill is still not due for another 10 days), and I have nothing to show for it. One of the sites I host is a business related site for my wife and we needed to get it back live quickly, so I started looking even harder for new hosting. As you can see I've found it. Now the fun part.
I called Arvixe to ask for a refund of the (premature) payment they took, because I was cancelling my hosting account, which would expire at the end of August. The wonderfully curt gentleman on the phone told me that there are no refunds. I'm sure he didn't understand what I was saying, as I explained that their taking my money and not providing me a service is, in my opinion, illegal. He declined to discuss legal matters with me, referring me to the lawyers instead.
As I explained this to my wife, and said that we are going to have to decline the charge on our credit card, she started seeing red too. She found biting Better Business Bureau reviews for Arvixe, on the Austin, Texas BBB site. Arvixe currently has a rating of 'F' with 173 complaints. Here's the link. Wow. I knew they had gotten worse, but this is really bad. Also, PC World must be getting kick-backs, because in July they rated them 'Excellent'. Their article is really just a crummy commercial.
So, since they will not refund the money for a service I'm not currently getting and have cancelled in the future, we'll be filing our own complaints.
Oh, Arvixe also says that they will charge a fee for credit card chargebacks (disputing a credit card charge). I'm sure the credit card companies will love to see dispute after dispute coming from the same company.