Pay attention to the small print!
Written by Nico on December 11, 2008 – 2:59 pm -Most hosting providers and domain registrars hide stuff they don’t want you to know about in their “general terms and conditions”, “terms of service” or “acceptable use policy” you agree on those when you sign up for their service. It’s that 40 page long document you scroll thru to click the “I agree” checkbox at the bottom.
Some domain registrars have high fees to transfer your domain to another registrar. easyspace.com, for example, charges $22 to transfer your domain or $37 to change the owner! Their 45 page long Terms & Conditions includes:
You agree that you may not transfer a domain name registration to another domain name registrar during the first sixty (60) days from the effective date of the initial domain name registration with us. After that time, you may transfer your domain name registration to a third party domain name registrar of your choice, subject to our then-current policies and procedures incorporated herein by reference.
Note the marked part! Basically they can add whatever they want after you have agreed! I use Dynadot for all my domain registrations and they don’t charge for domain transfers or owner changes at all and they have some of the lowest pricing.
The same kind of hidden fees can be found with hosting services. The dedicated servers I have running all come with 2000GB of traffic included and I used about another 20GB on one of them. Yes, 20GB is a lot of traffic, more than most shared hosting plans include, but in this case it was only 1% more then I had paid for. The invoice I got, on top of my regular hosting fee, was enough to cover the expenses for another dedicated server, plus setup cost!
Already knowing about the high price of usage beyond the plans included bandwidth, I always keep a close eye on how much I use. But it turned out that the traffic reports you can view in cpanel are not what the billing is based on. The traffic used on the server is measured at the switch that the server is connected to. You can see those numbers too, but only after you ask for it!
After opening a support ticket for this issue, I got the standard reply. Something like: I can’t help you, the invoice has been created and has to be paid or your server will be taken offline. After mailing with both the support and billing departments a few times, and basically being told the same shit again, I looked up who is in charge and gave him a call. Within a few minutes I had access to the traffic stats on the switch and the extra bandwidth bill had been canceled. It’s all about talking to the right guy.
Costs like these are often not easy to spot. The endlessly long terms & conditions you have to agree upon are almost always too long to read and even if you manage to read the whole thing, you will probably not understand half of it because of the way things are formulated.
But don’t despair, sites like Web Hosting Talk are a good place to find out about which hosting provider is good and which ones will screw you. Remember Google is your friend, when it comes to finding reviews about companies. Do your homework before signing up for anything!
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Tags: domain registration, hosting
Posted in Start Blogging | 2 Comments »
January 29th, 2009 at 5:25 am
I looked up who is in charge and gave him a call
January 29th, 2009 at 5:44 am
yes, that’s what I said…