What happens if recurring credit card charges fail?
This page is a FAQ as well as our official Failed Payments Policy
In the case of an automatic payment failing in relation to a monthly hosting subscription, our system will alert you via email that the credit card charge has failed and that you must take immediate action. If we don’t hear back from you and/or don’t receive payment, we will need to disable and later delete your server from our network. Keep in mind that as per our data retention policy, we will maintain your CodeGuard backups for around 30 days (even if a payment has failed), however, client access to CodeGuard will be revoked in the case of non-payment until payment is received. After 30 days we consider a hosting subscription “abandoned” and will mark it “canceled” within our system, at which point all data related to your account (DigitalOcean, CodeGuard, CloudFlare, SendGrid etc) will be permanently deleted. If you are planning to migrate your site away from LittleBizzy, please do not wait until the end of the month if you wish to avoid these complications.
NOTICE: After May 2016, our team will no longer send out “reminder” tickets regarding failed payments. Instead, we will simply be disabling and later deleting servers automatically based on the below schedule. Our system will still send you an email whenever an automatic payment has failed, so please kindly pay attention and quickly rectify any billing problems to avoid down-time. Thanks!
EXCEPTIONS: Please note that below schedule does not in any case apply to Resellers, or any account exceeding $320/mo in billables. In such cases, automatic payment is expected to go thru *immediately* each month on the default card or alternative card attached to your account. If our team must repeatedly deal with billing issues — e.g. more than 2x/year per calendar year on such accounts — we will proceed to begin charging an additional late fee each month on a per-site basis.
- 12-24 hours: Our system will attempt to automatically re-charge your credit card within 12 hours, and our team may also attempt to manually re-charge your credit card during this time period. We strongly encourage clients to maintain a second (backup) credit card on file to ensure no down-time occurs, otherwise if no successful charge can be made, our team will proceed to disable all of your servers during this time period. If only one credit card is on file, or if no credit card is on file, our team may immediately suspend your server(s) without waiting the full 24 hour period. If some of your charges were successful, we will assume a security block is on the card, and will proceed with more leniency.
- 24-48 hours: Our system will continue to attempt to re-charge your credit card within 48 hours, however your server(s) will remain disabled until payment is successful. In many cases we are more than happy to delay the disabling of your server if we hear from you, but if no contact is received we must assume abandonment. If payment is received before 48 hours, your server is re-enabled and a Re-Activation Fee is assessed per website. The purpose of this fee is to cover the time required by our team to deal with failed payments, and to encourage the use of “backup” credit cards.
- 48-72+ hours: After 48 hours we assume cancellation and delete your server(s). Your website data will remain backed up in CodeGuard during this time, so if payment is suddenly received, we will retain the same subscription # for your website and assess a Site Migration Fee to rebuild a new VPS server for each of your websites. If more than 3-4 days have passed, we will proceed to permanently cancel your subscription; however, at any point during this period you may submit a New Order for hosting (a new subscription) and our team can use CodeGuard backups to build a new server for you.
- 30+ days: After more than 2-3 weeks have passed, all data (including CodeGuard backups) related to your account will be permanently deleted. Even if you submit a New Order for hosting, we will not be able to restore your website in any fashion at this point — in other words, we will need to treat you as a completely new client meaning that you must provide the website data (files + database) you wish to migrate to our cloud. Our “free migration” option will not be available to any website that has been previously hosted with LittleBizzy, and a Site Migration Fee will apply in all cases.
Ultimately, please keep in mind that LittleBizzy does not aim to be like HostGator (etc), chasing down clients for unpaid hosting invoices each month. Rather, we aim to offer outstanding quality and service to successful, professional business owners in an atmosphere of mutual respect and responsibility. Under this failed payments policy, our clients are provided multiple email notices and over 48 hours (or more) to rectify billing problems, which we feel is quite fair.
As LittleBizzy is a reseller of various upstream services, unpaid invoices = money taken directly out of our pocket on a daily or even hourly basis. Clearly, our business wouldn’t last very long if we had an overly liberal “late payments” policy! We thank you ahead of time for keeping a watchful eye on your email account and any billing issues, and welcome your feedback at anytime.
Related content:
- https://www.littlebizzy.com/faq/multiple-credit-cards
- https://www.littlebizzy.com/faq/target-clients