Late fee on a hosting account?

[deeplist]

You must not have a very large operation. The larger you get, the more deadbeats you pick up. It goes beyong trying to "talk" with them because most will just completely ignore you until you cut them off. Then (like magic) within a hour or two, you'll hear from them.

[Seraphim]

The sad part is at my current scale all of the deadbeats are people I actually know. Everyone else is either free or pays like clockwork- a few even paid anyway on a month when I credited them for downtime and they didn't have to.

As time goes on I'll probably have to be more strict about it to keep the balances owed at a minimum in order to avoid letting them leech my business to death. But for now the figures are so small that I am paying the bulk of the bills out of my own pocket anyway.

[EXBInt2010]

We absolutely charge late fees. We'll get clients who are gone due to lack of payment for 30 or 45 days at a time, then just expect their accounts to get reactivated when they come back and pay. Sorry! After 30 days, the content on all unpaid accounts is transferred to a backup server. After 60 days, it's deleted.

If clients come back and pay after the 30 days, we charge a late fee because somebody has to physically transfer their data back to a production server and setup the account all over again. It's a huge hassle, and we charge for such hassle.

We use the same method as yours There are clients came back after 90-day of expiry date and by the time, the webfiles and database already removed from our servers. Sorry for late and please re-do your website

[ptimo3]

Would depend on the client..
I have regulars who go overtime ... but i know em personaly ...
but i don't think adding a latefee is a bad thing, unless you suspend em ..

[Derek Flahost]

I believe it is necessary to place a late payment fees on those who pay more late than 7 days. A lot of consumers, they usually reluctant to pay, although they had enjoyed the service. Placing a late payment charge will make them pay on time.

[don19]

I think better to add late fee.

As the invoice already sent before the service overdue ( like 1 week, 2 week ? )

it is lot of time to get the invoice get paid.

if all ( most ? ) client keep late payment, it seem annoy

[deeplist]

I send out the invoices a week in advance. Once the due date has passed, I have a one week grace period. After that time has elapsed (and the invoice becomes > 8 days overdue) a late fee is added. By that time, they've had 2 weeks to pay, 1 invoice created email, 3 reminder emails, and 3 overdue notices. They are deserving of a late charge by then and I also begin looking into suspensions. If they are a first time offender, I will usually waive the late charge or give them some wiggle room. If they're habitually late, I look into removing the grace period and/or immediate suspension and late fee calculation.

[UmbeeHosting]

There are hosting companies that give some leeway on late payments like they just dont suspend the account automatically but give you some five days before suspending the account.

[Webcs-Peter]

Additiopnal fees disattract the customers. We ahd a bad experince in the past. Now we try to reduce all the extra payments

[deeplist]

Additiopnal fees disattract the customers. We ahd a bad experince in the past. Now we try to reduce all the extra payments

What do you mean by that? "Additional fees distract the customers?" If they're late, they're late. It's no different than anything else: utility bills, credit cards, mortgage payments, etc. If they don't pay when they're supposed to, you have to discipline them somehow. Otherwise, they won't take you seriously and will just walk all over you, or not pay at all.

[sander k]

Lol, I wouldn't pay

[Sain Cai]

As a client I would certainly expect some sort of late penalty if I was late with a payment. Hosting services need to pay their bills as well, so why should the client be able to simply slide? They know when they are supposed to pay, simple as that. As Deep stated, it isnt any different then any other bill they have. Those have a "pay by" date and if not then you are apt to accrue late fees.

As long as its clear that late fees will be issued far beforehand, or when a person agrees to the service, then I see nothing wrong with it.

[mtwiscool]

i think if a clints misses paying for hosting on time even onece give 24 hours warning and than delit the website and ---- you to the person

[CS Squad]

i think if a clints misses paying for hosting on time even onece give 24 hours warning and than delit the website and ---- you to the person

Don't you think 24 hours is too short?

[The Crasher]

well i do it differend and so far it works perfect

i apply late fee's to all my systems ( dedicated , vps and hosting and radio shoutcasting and so on)

20% late fee get added after 2 Days
account get suspended after 3 days
account get destroyed after 15 days
backup is avaible for 60 days after account is destroyed so they can restore everything back

the min fee i charge is 1€ , the reason why i do that is because it is not my job to keep your files when you do not have a service with us anymore ( that happeds if you are overdue )

we do provide a extra service to keep your files , and that is why it get charged
the space we need to waste to keep your account alive can be used for other clients , so it is normal for us that we charge you for your space that you used when we could use it for a paid user

we allow clients to create new services if they do not like to pay for there "backup" , but that is a choise the client need to make ( do i like to get my files back ? or just a fresh hosting account ?)

so it depends how you look at it , but quality cost money and to maintain quality do we need to provide some rules to prevent abusing

hosting providers who charge to get a service back re activated are more stable hosting providers then providers who just keep your account for 30 days
they get less abused and clients are more likely to pay on time or warn you why they can not pay instead that they say ... i got 30 days left

so for me this system is working perfect , my clients are happy and they understand it , so i see no reason why i should do it differend

so to make a long story short
keep in mind what you like to provide , do you like to waste space for free ? do you got other ways to "force" users to pay ? can your quality handle overdue charges ??
depending on differend value's you can choose to charge extra or not

Greetings From PowerChaos