FreshWebz Web Design & Affiliate Marketing Blog

We are now offering Windows hosting at exactly the same price as our Linux hosting, unlike many other companies who charge EXTRA for Windows Hosting.

Microsoft’s hosting division has managed to carve out an impressive market share in recent years with 25% of all active sites reportedly run on Microsoft servers (Source: Netcraft).

Order web hosting from Freshwebz and choose Windows hosting for FREE!!!

I’ve finally got round to setting up the web hosting site for FreshWebz.

Although I offered cheap web hosting through the main web design site, Heart allows you to offer web hosting services through their online payments system, Hostpay.

However, every other time I’ve looked at setting it up, it just seemed to be too complicated, or not working properly…………this time though, I decided I HAD to get it working & spent the last 2 days pulling it apart & putting the pieces back together.

Suddenly, it all seemed to click into place (as these things often do) and my web hosting site is finally working!!

I’m offering basic web hosting from £1.49 per month, although the two main packages (Starter & SOHO) cost £2.49 & £4.49 per month respectively. However, I think these prices are still damn good value.

The reason I was so keen to get it up & running was so that I could offer web hosting without having to be as hands on. The Hostpay system allows people to register domain names & set up their hosting without any intervention from me, just like one of the mainstream companies & offering all the same extras & features that Heart Internet offer themselves.

Hopefully the low costs will attract plenty of customers!

I recently wrote about my problems with tiscali customer service, followed by 1and1 and this problem rumbles on:

I was interested to read a web page on someone else’s battles with 1and1 http://www.simonjones.info/1and1internet/, which appear to be similar to my own!

It appears that 1and1 have a POLICY of not bothering to reply to their customers as my e-mail to complaints@1and1.co.uk has also been ignored. I am now sending them a letter by normal post, in an attempt to stir them into some response! The irony is that I am quite happy to pay them any amount owed; all I want is an itemised bill showing what it is I am being asked to pay for!!!

My letter is shown below & is pretty self-explanatory:

I’m writing in connection with the appalling customer service I have (not) received from you.

I originally contacted your billing team after receiving a letter from a debt collection agency (Arvato Finance), for an amount that I had no knowledge of owing.

Since this initial letter, I have repeatedly asked for an itemised statement of account, so that I understand what it is I am paying for.

I asked for my account to be closed on 8th February 2009 after being a customer of yours for a number of years, because I was having more & more trouble with my account; domains were being suspended for too much traffic & I was told I had to have a dedicated server! I was also being told I was spamming people using the newsletter tool (which I wasn’t) & in the end, I felt it better to move all my domains to a new web host (where I have had NO problems).

Although I was closing the account, I did not expect complete access to be withdrawn immediately, as the cancellation page said that the contract would be ended on 22nd February. As a result, I was unable to access my mailing lists & lost all records relating to who was still subscribed etc. Despite asking your support teams if I could have access to the account, just to download the addresses held in my newsletter tool & to check the final balance, I was told it was not possible because the account was closed. That was it; no other help or information was offered! One of your customer service team did ask what I meant by “accessing my mailing list details”, I replied, but never got any response!

As far as I was aware, my payments were being made by direct debit throughout the whole of the time I was a customer, so I therefore had no idea of whether there was a balance due & never received a closing statement of account. I wrote a number of times asking for an itemised bill to be sent to me, but the only response I got was an e-mail telling me that I owed £187.03. I don’t know of any other business that just tells people they owe an amount & expect them to pay it, without sending a final statement/bill, so I again, requested this to be sent to me.

The next thing I know, a letter demanding £178.59 (plus £15 costs) arrives from Arvato! Naturally, I queried this, as the amount is different from what I was previously told & to be honest, I expected a reply from you with an account, not a threatening demand for payment with costs.

Since then, I have repeatedly asked for an itemised account, explaining what the charges are in respect of, which I would then be happy to pay. I am not prepared to just hand over nearly £200 (bearing in mind the actual amount quoted has changed 3 times without any explanation), not knowing what the charges are for.

I was originally receiving responses to my e-mails from Idil Ahmed, which were usually one line answers, totally unhelpful & completely ignored my requests for a broken down, itemised account, as well as my requests for the matter to be dealt with by a manager, or someone else who COULD provide what I believe I am entitled to receive, BEFORE involving a debt collection agency!

All the e-mails to Arvato were answered simply saying that I should query the balance with you, although one stated that you had told them my account was not closed, even though it was! I have been quoted three different figures & you tell your debt collectors that my account is not closed – hardly competent!

All I want is a closing account statement/invoice, which shows how much I am being charged & what the charges relate to. I do not see why this should be such a problem to provide, but it seems to be beyond the abilities of Mr Ahmed, which is why I asked for the case to be passed to his manager.

However, all I was given was your complaints@1and1.co.uk e-mail address, which I wrote to on 8th May. I have NEVER received any reply from this address & today received a further e-mail from Arvato, which stated:

“I have received information back from 1&1, stating that the account was cancelled on the 22nd February 2009. However your invoices were raised in January and beginning of February, therefore as stated in 1&1 terms and conditions the account an acount has to be cancelled 14 days prior to an invoice being raised, therefore the full balance of £193.59 is due.”

IS the balance of £178.59 up to the period 22/02/09? Even though I could not access my account, all my records & mailing list from 8th February, I am EXPECTED to pay up to 22nd February? I understand if I had to give you 14 days notice of cancellation, but why then was my account closed from 8th February? It made things very inconvenient for me & I had to pay a couple of hundred pounds to re-clean my mailing list, because you wouldn’t let me access them.

All I have been asking for is an itemised statement for my records, showing the charges & what period they are for. However, you seem completely incapable or unwilling to provide this! I now think the reason you can’t is that you messed up by closing my account too early & now can’t produce an accurate bill!!!!

As a former debt recovery manager, I would not have expected any customer to pay an amount which they had not been sent a bill for and I would be able to produce a copy of that bill should they query it, or state it had not been received. I believe this is simply good practice & do not understand why your staff, or your billing system, is unable to do this.

I can provide copies of all the e-mails that have been going back & forth for the last 4 months & would be perfectly prepared to provide them to a court, should you deem it necessary to go that far! I do hope that this will not be necessary & you can provide me with a closing account, which will show that I am being charged legitimate charges for hosting services that I am liable for. Upon receipt, I will make immediate payment!

I have said this constantly throughout the last 3-4 months, but it seems that your customer services people have a set routine of answers & cannot deviate from these in any way! Usually, they just stop replying & as stated previously, I have not received ANY response from you following my e-mail to your complaints address! However, having viewed other people’s similar problems on the internet, it appears that it is your POLICY to just ignore your customers, if any enquiry is slightly out of the ordinary!

I hope you will now be able to deal with this complaint, provide a closing, itemised statement, which I will then pay. I do not really want this to go any further, in what is really a very simple request, which you seem unable or unwilling to meet. However, I am prepared to stand my ground & will not be bullied into paying you amounts of money that you (for all I know) have plucked out of thin air!

I look forward to your response (finally) to this complaint.

To quote Simon Jones (see his web page): “1AND1 INTERNET IS A CHEAP WEB HOSTING COMPANY, BUT AS WITH MANY CHEAP THINGS, IF YOU USE THEM YOU’LL FIND OUT SOONER OR LATER THAT THEY ARE IN FACT… RUBBISH!” Amazingly enough, this is also my view on Tiscali!!!

Following the nightmare that were my attempts to transfer my hosting from 1and1 to Heart & the subsequent efforts to transfer them back again (because of unforseen costs), I had started to have problems with 1and1 over my price comparison site, UK Shopping Spree, which had previously been running for months without any issues! All of a sudden, it was supposedly taking ALL the resources of the shared server I was on & I was told the only options were fix the site, or have a dedicated server (from £69.99 per month!). As 1and1 don’t allow access to the error logs for shared server customers, it was going to be a bit of a job to fix the problem within the month demanded.

At this point, I’d had enough & as my .com domains were still hosted at Heart (& I had already paid them for hosting as well) I decided to jump in with both feet & become a hosting reseller as well! Although some of my sites have been offline for about a week (not great), I think I’ve finally got things back to normal (a few tweaks and adjustments are still needed) & most of the sites are back as they were before, albeit a bit out of date /  The ones of greatest concern were the membership sites, but hopefully this won’t cause any problems (fingers crossed).

The Heart reseller plan is only £29.99 a month & the features offered are pretty comprehensive, with one step installation of Wordpress & Joomla! available, a limitless number of databases & stacks of other tools & utilities that will make it easier for me to offer a much more comprehensive web building service, as well as the web hosting itself.

I do have a couple of web design jobs lined up now, so I don’t really have time to get to grips with all the options for configuring the online version of the web hosting at the moment, but have added my cheap web hosting plans to the FreshWebz site as well as information on buying domain names through FreshWebz. As soon as I get the sites built for my clients, I can get to work on the automated hosting platform.