Complaint Review: DarkStar Communications

I was one of the people who personally dealt with this client and i remember the whole credit card issue quite well, so let's go down the list and set some of these statements to rest.

Where to start?
Lag:
There is occasionally instances of lag on almost all servers depending on the location, the surrounding infrastructure, routing issues and a myriad of other issues that we cannot always control, or resolve as we simply don't "own" every route, fiber, or connection to the locations where are servers are located. Whenever we have a client report latency to us, we request that the client sends us a tracert to the server, if there's latency showing in the submitted tracert and that latency's within our datacenter, or on of our carriers we work with our datacenter technicians and or our carrier to resolve the issue. In the case of Australia (love the country) it's a documented fact that there are many areas there that have a really poor infrastructure, and while we do whatever we are able to do to assist our clients there's often nothing we can do about their ISP's latency, or their routing policies.
In all cases, clients have the option to move to any one of our other locations by simply clicking a link in their provided web control panel.
We also offer a 45 day money back guarantee if there is an issue on our end that we are unable to resolve for the client, so it's curious that he would have been here an entire year with such horrible service without seeking a refund right off the bat.

Webhosting setup:
As a free service to our clients we do offer them the use of a webhosting account simply as a way to show our customers in a small way that we appreciate them. This is a free service, and the setup usually takes only a few minutes once the client has contacted us asking for it as directed in their control panel and responded to us with the specific information we request from them. (IE, domain name?, need a domain?, ect ect) Both our terms of service, and the webhosting welcome email specifically state to the clients that they are responsible for their own backups and that we do not make backups of user's websites, and while there's usually no need, we do have (as any company does) hardware failures, and issues with servers on occasion, honestly we wish we didn't, but it's simply on of the facts of dealing with hundreds of servers on a daily basis and while we hate that some folks have lost their data, there was nothing we could have done to have avoided it. the system's drive simply died...

The recurring charge and the credit card alteration claim:
All services with Darkstar Communications are subscription Based services, there are no "one time" packages with us, and this fact is clearly presented to all clients when they read(and accept, or say they did) the Term of Service agreement during the signup process, in their welcome emails, in our Support center's KB articles, and in almost every billing related communication that our system sends to our clients.
This can be found at https://www.darkstarllc.com/legal/terms-of-service/ under the heading of "Subscription Service" additionally the cancellation policy can be found in that same document, all very clearly spelled out, and nothing is "hidden" as the claim is stated.

to address the alleged changing of the client's expiration date on the card, did the client himself not say that he was getting notices of the card's expiration?, would this not then imply that our system saw that the card was expired?, and if that was the case, when the system attempted to charge the card the client's bank should have declined the charge... seriously are we to think that out of 55 thousand + clients, we purposely sought out a single client, and magically guessed the correct expiration date of his card so we could put the charge through?, our billing system is almost totally automated, not only would there be no need to ever mess with the billing side of any client's account manually, but it would serve no purpose to do so.
and making such a change would be unethical, but even aside from that, i looked at the client's account, and his card did in fact show as expired in our system, so regardless of someone's "guess" at his bank, this is something we "did not do".

The client states that he received several notices regarding the expired card, and those notices specifically state the following:(I have removed the personal information)
[Action Required]

Welcome Firstname Lastname!

The credit card you have on file (TYPE-XXXX) will expire on (exp/date).

Please login and update your credit card information to prevent disruption in your service.


BILLING INFORMATION:
https://billing.darkstarllc.com/
Username:user@domain.tld.au
password:123456789




Please contact us if you have any questions about your account.

Thank you,

Billing Dept.
DarkStar Communications

Date: xx/xx/2008




Account Management Interface
http://my.darkstarllc.com


The client never bothered to contact us one way or another until the account cycled and it became "an issue" for him. This could have easily been avoided with a simple 5 minutes of time on the client's part to inform us in advance of his intent not to renew the service rather than to try to simply ignore his contractual obligations to us.



Darkstar Communications has been in business for over 6 years now, if we treated clients in the manner described in this complaint, we simply would not have been.
All parties are welcome to visit us at http://www.darkstarllc.com, sales inquiries can be sent to sales@darkstarllc.com, our terms of service are located at https://www.darkstarllc.com/legal/terms-of-service/ and we have many tutorials located at http://support.darkstarllc.com/index.php (In the KB section)

I do hope this response sheds some light on the issue