E-VeT has just been through a difficult time after a disagreement with our previous hosting service and an extreme invoice for excessive bandwidth costs that, irrespective of any theoretical contractual agreement was 'unfair'. £4,250.00p (or to convert to US equivelent some $8,000.00) in seven weeks.

It was amazingly gratifying to see members of the mailing list creating a fund to help me out. Now that's community spirit!

The full story is fairly complex but from the veiwpoint of the hosting company this bandwidth was used and should be paid for. Now you may think that sounds fair enough but the reality was that some one or two external computers kept querying the same small script and cranked through the site's monthly bandwidth limit inside half a day...

E-Vet's Bandwidth Story:

My contention is that the Hosting Company should have had some form of Duty of Care to it’s users. Pipex chooses to disagree and claim that they have mechanisms available for the Webmaster to monitor traffic.

Yes, they do.. but only by viewing the bandwidth statistics on the web or be setting an email warning when that bandwidth has been exceeded. Again, on the face of it, that sounds fair. However the setting for the warning email wasn’t as intuitive as they claim and even had that setting been correct then the warning would have been issued within the first day of the site being hammered. Yet again that may seem fair but it makes no allowances for a smaller site owner either being ill, going away for a holiday or just not being savvy enough.

When one considers that towards the end this site was cranking through £1,000.00p a week in excess bandwidth charges then I remain convinced that there should have been better systems in force.

Our new hosts – Heart Internet – happen to run things slightly differently. For E-VeT I have taken out a totally unlimited package but even if we had rented the sort of site space and bandwidth this site had before then in a ‘worst case scenario’ the site becomes automatically suspended when the monthly bandwidth is exceeded and the owner is notified. Now that is an eminently safer approach!

The other major aspect of my dispute with Pipex is that the excessive bandwidth was not invoiced until the 21st of the month following. Nevertheless they subsequently managed to invoice for the month after that on the 5th day following! Now had they invoiced on the 5th day in the first case then I would have had another opportunity to disable the site myself and save over £2,000.00p.

Conspiracy theorists might wonder about Christmas Bonuses and even clever moves such as using other computers to weed out the unwary and trap them. Those of us who believe in integrity within large companies wouldn’t dream of such speculation.

This remains a matter of Buyer Beware and other website owners are duly warned.

My recommendation? – Avoid Pipex and consider HeartInternet

Peter Knapp