Re: [cobalt-users] Suspending Sites & Users

["Steve Werby" <steve-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Raymond K. Symons" <rksymons@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I think someone touched on this earlier, but just about anywhere, it is
*not
> legal* to do any of this without following a certain protocol.
>
> If an account is past due by a certain number of days, you must first send
a
> notification to the owner that they are past due, *and* you must give them
> *reasonable* time to respond and make a payment.

This is not legally required, but it probably makes good business sense.
Non-payment should be covered in the service contract or TOS.  If it's not,
the customer has no way to know what will happen when payment is late.

> Don't
> get yourself in a legal bind and open yourself up to lawsuits over
something
> like this.

When I was doing more webhosting (I'm not actively pursuing this revenue
stream anymore) I once changed a delinquent customer's site to point to a
page that said "Site suspended due to non-payment".  It was true and the
customer was extremely delinquent and was one I should have let go, but I
can tell you I won't do that again.  Now I use a mellower "The site you are
trying to access is currently inactive" and once a site is suspened
permanently I either remove the DNS records or point them to another site of
mine.

--
Steve Werby
President, Befriend Internet Services LLC
http://www.befriend.com/