Personal experiance, be careful about "Free Trial" web hosting

[subsystems]

Personal experiance, be careful about "Free Trial" web hosting.

One of my customers with a very busy site needed to switch hosting companies a while back. The hosting company had a shared server offer for $400/year with no bandwidth limit and a 30 day free trial. After the switch the site was slow and wouldn't stay up for more than 2 hrs at a time. Each time it went down it required a phone call to tech support. They "rebuild new servers" 3 or 4 times in the first 10 days. The site wouldn't stay up for any length of time.

In a desperate move my customer quickly installed an in-house server and moved their website in-house. Emails, faxes and phone calls were made notifying the hosting company that we were very unsatisfied and were terminating service less than 2 weeks into the 30 day free trial. A few weeks later my customer received a bill for $400. They claimed "Free Trial" meant the first month was free but the bill was for the remaining 11 months. First month free means something completely different than 30 day free trial. Trial being the operative word.

I made the following statement and they voided the bill.

Trial in the dictionary has 2 definitions that apply to this situation.
1. The act of testing something to find out about it with no commitments.
2. An annoying, frustrating or catastrophic event.
Looks like we mistakenly thought you meant the first definition when you obviously meant the second.

[danlefree]

Looks like we mistakenly thought you meant the first definition when you obviously meant the second.

Sorry to hear about the problems you encountered, but in some sense it has to have been worth the hardship to have a story with such a good punchline.