I have been an Afrihost customer for many, many years and have recommended them to many people over those years. They’ve been the Cool Ideas in the early years of ADSL. Then they were bought out and things have never been the same since.
After a very long fight with Telkom (thankfully I am now done with Telkom – for life!) and getting my Telkom service cancelled, I needed a temporary connectivity solution until my fiber was installed. So I headed over to Afrihost and signed up for their 20GB per month package which, with the Afrihost Plus+ option would have given me only 40GB per month at well over R1000.
Within a few days of signing up for this I discovered that I could get a Rain LTE package through Afrihost that would have given me >100GB per month for less money. So naturally I signed up thinking that the previous package would/could be converted to this one. This was on the 2nd of July 2018. Big mistake! I should have waited till the end of the month! Afrihost is perfectly willing to sign you up any day of the month and charge your pro-rata for the remainder of the month. You cannot cancel on any day though and expect to be charged only for the data you have used up till that point. Do not think that you can change one package for another either. So I ended up with both packages, overlapping each other and I would have had to pay for both for that month. Long story short, I appealed to Gian Visser and explained the situation and he agreed to refund me for the original package (pro-rated off course) that I was not using anymore.
The ”catch” with the Rain LTE offer was that I had to stay on it for 6 months otherwise I would be charged R999-00 for the LTE modem that came with the package. Fair enough. About 2-3 months into the term, my fiber was installed and I didn’t need/use the LTE data anymore. But I understood that I’d need to keep paying for it for the 6 months. It would have worked out a bit cheaper than to cancel and pay the R999-00.
So, come December 2018 – the 6th month of the term – and I cancelled the package on the 22nd. Understand that at this point I have already paid for the full 6 months – less 1 day since I signed up on the 2nd of the month. I did not want to risk having to pay for a 7th month for a service I wasn’t using anymore, hence my “early” cancellation. Lo and behold, I get an invoice for R999-00!
When querying this I was told that I cancelled within the 6 month period. I was told that “…the package will only complete the grace period on or after 2nd January.”. By cancelling on the 2nd of January, a) this would technically still be “within” the 6 month period and b) it would put me in the 7th month and I would be charged for the whole month.
At this point I am willing to pay for the 7 month since that is much cheaper than R999-00. I am still trying to engage with them but the “not-so-helpful-desk” has stopped responding to me.
I even appealed to Gian again but he hasn’t responded yet. Probably inundated with customer complaints...
Whether or not this gets resolved, this will be the end of Afrihost for me. For life!
