By pauldarr on

I transfered a site to a customer and removed the auto renewel. Siteground.com later auto renewed under my financial information while I was deployed in Afghanistan.

I contacted Siteground and the contacted the present site owner. The new owner paid for the site renewel from Siteground and all was well between the customer and Siteground. I had disputed the charges at my bank and it seemed I was going to get the money back. Siteground disputed the chargeback and is DOUBLE CHARGING for the site! What crooks! They aren't happy enough charging one person they have to rip off a second. Sitegrounds billing service is complete scam in it's set up.

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Comments

siteground’s picture

siteground commented

When I read your case here, I was at first appalled: charging two people for one and the same account is definitely NOT something SiteGround would ever want to do. So I checked the case in details and below is what I believe to be a fair explanation of what has happened:

First of all I want to inform you that we have already refunded the money taken from your credit card for the account in question and you will see them in your bank statement within the next 7 to 10 business days.
The hosting account in question was initially ordered by you with your Credit Card. At time of account expiration your credit card was still the only one related with the account and the account auto-renewal option was not stopped according to our records. So the renewal was charged on your Credit Card. At that time we had no knowledge of any website ownership change.

After the renewal, we did not hear anything from you explaining that the account ownership is in transit and that you consider that your credit card should not have been billed. Instead we received a notification from our bank for a charge back, which is something completely different from a refund and seriously harms our company credit history. We then did numerous unsuccessful attempts to contact you and discuss the situation and your reasons for the charge back. We now understand that you were not easily accessible for a good reason at that time (being deployed at Afghanistan), but we still needed to do something with the case. Before we received the first email from you with the ownership change explanation and before the new owner contacted us and provide the proper payment information we had already sent a dispute for the charge back to the bank as we had a limited time to react.

Now that the situation got cleared, the bank has recovered the charge back to us, and we have refunded your money the right way. I believe that the unpleasant situation was a result from lack of timely communication between you and SiteGround, and would like to assure you that our goal has never been to charge two people for one and the same account, but only to have all the charges and dues refunds done in the right way.

Reneta Tzankova
COO SiteGround.com

Arvind213’s picture

Arvind213 commented

The explanation from the COO is misleading. First of all, why do you block the information on your siteground about the credit card? Why should the customer change it? Why don't you leave it to the customer to opt for renewal instead of you directly charging him? It shows you are not transpararent. First you send a notice and then bring down the website, if required. But don't use credit card info second time or third time without the customer's consent. It is not a good practice.

Coming to experience with Siteground, please note that we too used siteground hosting for 6 years and finally you have prompted us to move in for cloud at a high amount and within a month downed our website citing more traffic. When we raise ticket, your staff was uncourteous and remain incommunicado. You don't open access to the website for days making us undergo mental agony.

Horrible experience. Whatever amount you give the Siteground, they are not pleased and want to fleece their customers more and more. It is the worst team and they shut down website with no prior notice and go incommunicado for days while you wonder whether you are dealing with a host provider or a government agency that is trying to nail you down.

My suggestion: Avoid Siteground at any cost. I suffered enough and I don't want others go through the same mental agony. I cursed them hundred times when I suffered. I hope they pay for their rude attitude one day.

Arvind.