Cancel your webhosting on time!

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Dear website owner,

I’d like to take a moment to discuss a topic that’s of interest to you, as a website owner.   Your website requires some sort of hosting for it to be published, right? Right.  What kind of website you’re hosting (Joomla, WordPress, something you brewed yourself) is irrelevant; at least at this moment.  Nor do I care where you buy your hosting (although I’d prefer you buying it from the company I work for, but this is not an ad).

What I do care about, is that some of you don’t seem to read the ‘Agreement’ when buying web hosting.  You buy hosting for one, two or three years and think nothing of it.  Agreement, Agreeschment, am I right?  But many of you are caught off guard when you wanted to move to another hosting provider; assuming that “your old deal ended”, because you received a new invoice.

If you assume that it suffices not to pay that invoice, you’re wrong in 9 out of 10 cases.  If you had read the agreement, in 90% of the cases, you’d have read that your web hosting package will be automatically extended with x years at the end of your contract, unless you take some sort of action to cancel your contract in time.  Since you agreed to the agreement, and didn’t take the required action to cancel the contract; you’ve now got a problem:  you want to move; but you’ll still have to pay for your “old contract”, as well.

Things could get worse, if your hosting provider is smart / evil / benevolent enough to write in their agreement that you can’t transfer your domain name unless you’ve cancelled your hosting contract in time.  At that point, there’s not much anyone can do for you.  We can arrange a hosting package elsewhere; but your precious domain name will be unavailable to you; unless you go to a long, and painful procedure.

So, web owner, be carefull.  Are you aware of the agreement you agreed to, or did you just click “yes”? and click ok? When you want to move to another hosting provider, are you aware of the conditions of cancelling your package?  For your own sake, DO inform yourself; or moving to your new hosting company might be far more complicated than you thought; not to mention costly.

I hope this advice reaches you in time.

Yours sincerely,

A fellow website owner.

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