Brinkster, please let met go …

Who ever knew that transferring of domains would be so cumbersome.

Several years ago, I used to subscribe to ewebcity as I was learning ASP. At the time, I had not much problems with it. In fact, I even enjoyed their simple interface and the live chat support that came along with it so much that I paid for their .personal hosting plan and bought a domain.

Ewebcity recently changed their name to brinkster. And about year ago, brinkster auto-renewed my subscription without prior notification. But at the moment, since I did not have any problems with them. In fact, I was ready to upgrade to their .professional package as I wanted to try out WordPress.

However, a quick check shows that it was actually quite difficult to set up WordPress as brinkster wasn’t capable of supporting .htaccess and neither do they have apache or litespeed server then.

But since brinkster already credited my money, I’d just stay on with it for another year.

And now that its been a year, I notified brinkster about my cancellation request on the 26th November. I also asked for a domain transfer to my new host. After several email transaction to date, my account was still active and I was charged money for it!

US$71! That’s about $110 in Singapore dollars. That was a lot of money to me! I could do a lot with that sum.

I thought that I could be clever and edit my personal details before the renewal date so that no money will be credited to my debit card. Interestingly, the programming there would not allow me to change my card details. Somehow, they still kept my personal details. This is so dangerous and intrusive to my privacy.

How can a company that won so many awards can be so bad at support? To date, I have spoken to two different billing consultants and at least three support consultants and yet nothing has been done about my account.

Update: After persevering for some days, the account has finally been closed on the 4th December.

4 Replies to “Brinkster, please let met go …”

  1. Yikes, this sounds a bit scary… not sure what you can do really apart from bug them and threaten legal action if nothing happens.

    Sounds like you want your account terminated asap though. Good luck, I hope you get it sorted soon!

  2. I hope so … knowing that they still keep the credit card number is really scary. What if all companies do that? They will be able to get money at any time they want!

  3. ish i was also billed the same as you. the auto-renew of domain w/o my knowledge but after contacting them, they revert back my $$

    it’s godaddy.com

    their support is topnotch but do read the fine prints

  4. Are you with godaddy.com, sha? The prices for it is really cheap, I remember, but there’s something about it that made me reluctant to sign up.

    Its said to be a very very slow server … 😐

    I’m currently subscribing under bluehost.com. So far its pretty good, very fast when I upload my files and has loads of goodies that I can use like coppermine gallery, wordpress, shopping cart, drupal and loads of other things 😀

    I like it very much 🙂

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