Let me start off this by saying that I had been with Heart Internet for over a year – I was a prompt payer and overall whilst the speed to load even a normal HTML file was not great, a reseller account had done what was needed.
A few months ago however, I decided that I needed to cut costs a little (especially with Christmas approaching) and that I would cancel my Heart Internet account. My intention at the time was to return to their service in the future as I hadn’t really had any issues with them.
This is where my problems started. First off, I couldn’t see anywhere on the site to actually cancel. Reading though and doing a google took me to the terms and conditions which stated that I needed to contact customer service to cancel.
I did this – got a response asking for my reasons of cancellation – I explained that I could not really afford it at the moment, and in response to this they offered me a month free. I declined, and they said to get in touch when I was ready to cancel. In the mean time, I setup a cheap VPN elsewhere for about a fiver a month – once I had this all sorted I emailed them to cancel the account, about a month after I originally got in contact with them.
The account was closed, and I started the process of changing the Name Servers to the new VPS account. Shortly after this, I tried to login to change another domain, and was presented with a page asking for payment for another month (luckily my card details had changed, so they couldn’t process this automatically).
The date of the account was from the 6th onwards – the normal billing cycle date and the day that I closed the account down. Assuming this was an error, I sent across an email explaining that I had closed the account down and could they please remove this payment so I could login and change my domain details.
Over 20 days later and this is still not resolved – after ignoring the email first of all, I phoned them up and was told someone was looking into it and would remove the payment. Nothing happened, a few days later, another phone call, someone looking it to it and would call be straight back – no phone call. Eventually, I received an email from them saying that the terms and conditions state I need to close the account 72 hours before the billing cycle, so even though my account was closed on the same day, I still had to pay for another month (something I had already explained I could not afford). I asked the matter to be escalated to the directors and he said to email them with my dispute. I wrote a lengthy email explaining the situation, that I had been happy and wanted to return to being a customer in the future, and that I’d even been offered a month free and asked for a direct response from one of them. I received no reply and when I emailed customer service again I was told that they had read my mail and I had to pay the outstanding month.
Ping-Pongs of emails later and I asked again for the directors to address the actual points made in the mail. I did a search for Heart Internet on google and found a page with many critical reviews of Heart Internet – mostly about the customer service, I was beginning to realise this was their bad point that I hadn’t experienced up until now.
So, I still have no response – I can’t change any of my domain details as the account is locked out, and the stand off continues – I’m unwilling to pay for an account that no longer exists and they are unwilling to let me access my domain details to change them.
I’ve really got no idea what the next step is, or how I can change these – I have contacted Nominet to try and get them transferred, but that could be a longer process.
If anyone on out there was thinking of giving them a try, I urge you strongly to re-consider. Their reseller account may seem like a good price, but it’s far from the best service you will receive.
Any suggestions of what to do are appreciated..
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