Fasthosts will not refund for a service they did not provide?

infocom

I signed up for a Fasthosts web hosting account, but it did not work for my website, the support could not fix it. So I moved it somewhere else and asked for a refund. They will not provide a refund because I agreed to a 12 month term. I am surprised by this, as they did not provide the service I paid for.

Here is the interesting part... I enquired about the distance selling regulations. Their terms have the following clause:

"By placing your order for the Services, you agree to us commencing supply of those Services before the seven working days cooling off period has expired. As a result, you will not have the right to cancel the Contract under the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000."

They stated this means I cannot cancel it. I dont get it though, because it states my cooling off period has not expired yet. But the next line states I therefore cannot cancel. Does not make sense.

Anyone know anything about this?

infocom

my concern is if this clause means the distance selling regulations do not apply, then anyone could use this line, therefore making the distance selling regulations pointless.

Andy_L

They are correct
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2000/2334/regulation/13/made

" the consumer will not have the right to cancel the contract by giving notice of cancellation pursuant to regulation 10 in respect of contracts—
(a)for the supply of services if the supplier has complied with regulation 8(3) and performance of the contract has begun with the consumer’s agreement before the end of the cancellation period applicable under regulation 12;"
( reg 8 saying that a service contract can't be DSR'd when started if they tell you so in advance & reg 12 giving the 7 days cooling off period)

However I would have thought you are cancelling under the "product/service" doesn't work regulations rather than the "no reason for return needed" DSR.

Is this a business website or personal. If the former then this is a business-to-business transaction in which case a lot of consumer protection legislation doesn't apply

infocom

Well... the website/hosting is a personal site for a friend, BUT I purchased it through my business so I guess business to business is applicable. I am amazed business do not get the protection a person would get.

Either way, the service did not work. The website works fine on a new hosting provider. Fasthosts admitted the first problem was theirs, then just kept fixing the rest of the problems as they happened, but they kept happening and the site was down for 12 hours, so I moved away. I am amazed I have to pay for a 12 month contract when they could not provide working service. Their argument is I should have just kept asking their support to help. but I did, and they couldn't. Where does one draw the line in giving up asking for help?! 12 hours was the line for me, but I am powerless to cancel the 12 month agreement.

They state they do not provide a service level agreement. So I suppose in theory they could provide a hosting account that is offline for 12 months and I still have to pay?

bris

You may not have consumer law on your side but you do have contract law. It is very similar in the respect that they still have to fulfill the contract. If they cant provide the service they are in breach of the contract. You can still take them to court the same way a consumer would for failing to provide the service.

System

Why didn't the website work? Did your website try to do something that wasn't supported?

infocom

First it could not connect to the database, even though all settings were correct. Fasthosts admitted an issue their end whereby the database users were being deleted or something. That was fixed.

THEN I had max user connections to the database exceeded. Turns out they only allow 20 maximum on their shared accounts. It is not a very popular site at all! A forum with only a few regular users. So I am not sure why this was happening. They could not fix this at all!! So I had a great idea to create 5 database users and randomly use different ones in my site config to connect, so in effect I had a 100 max database connections. That worked fine for a short time.

THEN the site started to have Internal Server 500 Errors. It was not related to my random database user, as I reverted that back to test and still had the issue. Fasthosts stated something about clearing out 123 open threads or something and it came back.

THEN the problem happened again and support are too slow to fix it. But by this time, with all the downtime, I gave up relying on them and moved it to another server. And on this new server I have had...... ZERO! problems .

So I think the Fasthosts account could not handle it, yet there is not much to handle. The site is using the SMF forum system, not completely up to date but has been operational for 6 years until we moved it to Fasthosts! And is back again after moving off Fasthosts.

Serenity

Anyone questioning OP's issues, google reviews for fasthosts. They are a joke. Good luck getting something sorted OP.

infocom

Well to be honest I should have known better. I used them years ago when first setting up the business before becoming an expert. It was 6 years ago, and my friend needed a cheap hosting provider due to it being non-commercial, so I thought I would try them again, surely they would be better 6 years later for a hobby site.... Sadly no!

I have told my friend there IS such a thing as cheap hosting, but you get what you pay for and its rubbish! If you need reliability and good support you do have to pay a bit more.