Know your rights? Get Fasthosts to cancel YOU.

Would YOU do business with a company like this?

(Poll at the end of this post)

Fasthosts have updated their Terms & Conditions.  Amongst other things, they have clarified their cancellation policy.  If you are considering opening an account with Fasthosts, take care to read the policy, and decide for yourself if this is the sort of company you want to do business with:

All hosting, email and dedicated server accounts are subject to a 12 month minimum contract term.

Cancellations

• After the minimum contract period, customers may cancel any package by contacting the Customer Care team on +44 (0) 1452 561858 (Monday to Friday, 9:00am to 5:30pm UK time). Customers must provide details of the account/package to close, including the account Owner Password for verification. Fasthosts will not, under any circumstances, close an account without first confirming the Owner Password.
• Customers will be required to complete a Closure Confirmation form, authorising the permanent removal of all website and email services on the account, from our system.
• On receipt of a completed Closure Confirmation form, the account will be scheduled to close. Fasthosts will acknowledge the closure by sending an email to the email address registered on the account.
• If Fasthosts do not receive the completed Closure Confirmation form within 14 days of sending, the cancellation request will be discarded and the account/package will remain open.
• Any incentives that were offered to customers when opening their account will also be cancelled. Customers may be given the option to purchase services which were offered as start-up incentives, in the result of a cancellation.
• Fasthosts reserves the right to cancel the service at any time.

This is particularly important to us, because we look after a large number of Fasthosts Customer Accounts, and we’ve been closing them down one by one for several months.  All of a sudden, Fasthosts have made this process considerably more difficult.  But let’s take a look at the detail of this process; Consider the following scenario:

As a new customer, you want a simple hosting account for your company website.  You’re a start-up so you register the domain, and open the account with Fasthosts, maybe populating the site with a simple holding page.  Six weeks later, you’re ready to go with your website, and your developer starts to load the code onto Fasthosts servers only to find out that essential services you need are not available, or require a premium payment.  You decide to bite the bullet and buy that database or additional space, but four weeks later Fasthosts take your website down during your main promotional push with no prior notification, and technical support tell you it’s a known issue that the engineers are working on, and generally patronise you (read about support).  Two days later your site is back on-line, you’ve missed a few hundred pounds of orders, so you decide you can’t risk a repeat of the situation.  When you start the process of closing your account, you discover you are committed to a 12 month minimum term.

Does this scenario sound unreasonable?  Think again.  We have 16 customers who have suffered precisely these circumstances, and we know FH resellers who are dealing with more.

The process of cancellation requires you to jump through so many hoops, FH clearly consider you to be a circus performer. Even if you complete their four week cancellation process, the account will be scheduled  to close.  There is no statement of how long before it is cancelled, and on their current record, you can almost guarentee that this will result in at least one months additional billing.

We would seriously question the legal integrity of this process, given the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations, and we may have the opportunity to exercise this if FH do not accept written cancellation as set out in these regulations over the next few months.

We are slowly winding down our own and our customers accounts on FH, so far having cancelled more than 50% of our positions. We are certain many companies and individuals are doing the same, and as a result FH have varied their terms to bleed their income streams that one month longer.

The last statement says it all.  It means: “Regardless of any convoluted process or sense of jeapordy we may have created in the process of cancelling your account, and the distinct lack of commitment or any timescale to cancellation, we can drop you instantly, without reference to you, and at your cost.”

Elsewhere in the Terms & Conditions, we find utterly unreasonable terms such as this (Broadband Related):

• When you give us notice we will charge you for the remainder of the month you are in plus one full month’s notice.

There really should be a website dedicated to this sort of blatant profiteering.

But the most interesting is this:

Customers will only be entitled to a refund when the service is within a trial period, or where the service is cancelled by Fasthosts.

In the event that Fasthosts cancels the customer’s service, the customer will be entitled to a pro rata refund based upon the remaining period of membership. If a customer contravenes Fasthosts’ Terms of Service a refund may not be issued in the event of a cancellation..

So, if you want to cancel quickly, we advise you to find some way to cause Fasthosts to exercise their “right to cancel the service at any time”.  Good luck and post here if you manage it.