You may notice your servers have been (and currently are) down for some time today. This is due to our provider who, while generally good and pretty inexpensive, are truly a bunch of money grubbing jerks. Let me explain a bit:

The way invoicing works at our provider is that if a server is due on some day, you can pay up to five days late without service disruption. This really helps because one stupid thing the provider does is group multiple servers into the same invoice- this means that if two servers are due on the same day, and one person pays but the other doesn't, I can't pay for just the one for which I received money! Having a little bit of extra time is really helpful.

So what if you don't pay by that fifth day? Well then, as expected, they terminate your server. Makes sense, right? Don't pay, server gets turn off. All well and good.

But they take it a step further. Their rule is that if the server runs for 3 days past the due date, they charge you for the next month! So even if a server gets shut off because it wasn't paid for, they still send me an invoice!

So since February I've been ignoring three invoices that were for cancelled servers. The invoice balance was for a period of time the server was not online (as it was shut down for nonpayment). I figured they were just errors or somesuch and never paid them.

Recently, I got an e-mail asking me why I haven't paid these "overdue" invoices. I explained they were for canceled servers, at which point the provider said that once a server is 3 days into a new term, it must be paid for. They told me new servers wouldn't be activated until the old invoices were paid, which I didn't really care about at the time. I told them I would not be paying old invoices for which I did not receive service.



Today, every single server ATP Host provides was shut down. Every single one. Because I owed them $23. They shut down all twenty four of our servers over $23. Twenty three dollars. Of course, I pay through Paypal which doesn't provide any buyer protection for services (only products), so getting refunds was out of the question.


So fifteen minutes ago I ate the cost and paid these [expletive deleted] their $23 out of my pocket. Servers are still offline as of this post. At this point, I'm $23 in the red and giving money to a company that seriously screwed me over. I'm not sure at this point if ATP Host will continue after this month. If you have paid in advance, you will receive a refund.


Donations are appreciated. Sorry for the trouble.

[Edit]
Forty-five minutes after payment, all servers are back online. Again, I'm not sure what will happen after this month, I will likely stop running ATP Host.

D4RK3 54B3R is the coolest guy around, he paid the entire debt. Everyone should thank him immensely.