Anyone else here use more than two or three products from AH? I am curious to see if anyone is having the same experience as us.
I am sad to report that AH hosts close to 60 domains for us, and also provides us with many bandwidth products.
AH have been regularly running individual debit orders for random products instead of putting all products onto one invoice at the end of each month and debiting our account once per month as they promised they would do.
The extra debit orders they run are generally for small amounts on new products purchased through the month. These include but are not limited to amounts such as R1.50 for pro-rata new domain registrations, R 5.00 for a 1G top up or R 97 for yearly domain renewals. The debit order charges from the bank are in most instances, larger than the AH debit order value.
I have complained numerous times to AH asking them to invoice us one single amount and run one debit order each month. Their responses to my requests are mostly canned and always weak.
About two months ago they promised to sort it out for me. They acknowledged that their processes needed improvement for larger accounts. However, when they tried to sort it out, instead of billing me once per month for all the products we use, our account was debited for 12 times the "normal" amount because AH charged us upfront for a year in advance instead of the monthly fees we have been paying them for over 10 years. I had to fight tooth and nail to be refunded. They eventually obliged and returned our money. They then assured us that their systems were now up to date on our account
Low and behold, just to rub salt in this wound and also to prove how incompetent they can be, they proceeded to run three small debit amounts from our account immediately after the refund was provided, for two bandwidth top-ups and a new domain we registered.
Thanks to AH, our bank charges just for our debit orders run unnecessarily into the hundreds of rands every month.
They seem to lack the competency to manage larger accounts and instead continue to allow their billing automation to proceed not understanding that larger accounts need accounts managers.
We know that one account manager could easily manage 100 accounts, I know this because our own little business is able to do it with ease. Like AH we also run debit orders for our clients and we also have a wide range of products that customers can use each month. Our in-house systems adds the additional products clients use in the month to their account and at the end of each month the client is sent one invoice and one debit order is processed.
Our business also experiences hundreds of transactions each month and we manage this with no problems at all. The principal is so simple to grasp that we could in fact manage millions of transactions in this manner with no ease. It really is a very easy thing to manage. Any new products taken after the debit order run date are simply added to the clients account for the end of the next month’s debit order run. It’s easy.
I feel trapped by AH as moving all our products to a new ISP, which we are emotionally ready to do, will unfortunately require tens of thousands of rands in human resource time not to mention the added frustrations of dealing with angry customers because domains will be down, we will risk potential data problems moving databases, we will have to change the email settings for hundreds of people and also have to deal with all the other general headaches that come with a change in ISP.
Does anyone have any thoughts on how we can solve this problem? Can I take this up in court for the frustration caused? Can we force AH to improve their billing department processes?
@Afrihost, if you read this. You need help. I need you to get that help so I can help myself. I am very happy to quote you for our consultation services to help you fix your billing departments problems, once and for all.
@ Afrihost. I also have very valid complaints related to your hosting incompetency’s, the expensive mix-ups between your mail servers and windows servers, your sever lack of bandwidth speed delivery on multiple lines around SA and a number of support issues such as the over 300 hours we have spent with your call centre this year.
