Electric Kitten: Worst Company Ever 27 January 2009
A review of the Electric Kitten Hosting Company- the worst company I have ever had the misfortune to conduct business with.
My apologies- its a bit of a long one, but hopefully you’ll find time to enjoy it in full. First, A bit of background. I’ve used a number of companies to host my website on over the years, mostly my reasons for leaving a company have been due to the technical requirements I need- I was on a Microsoft ASP server but I wanted to use PHP, I had a host that only offered PHP 4 and I needed PHP 5 to use Habari… and so on.
However, there is one company which I have used that needs to be exposed as incompetent, unreliable, and crooked.
Electric Kitten Hosting
Electric Kitten Hosting are a company based in Los Angeles. I used their service between February 2007 and February 2008.
For a website hosting company, reliability is really the core of your service- the uptime of Electric Kitten was incredibly poor, and frequently not only were the file hosting servers unreachable but the domain name servers had fallen over also. The customer service website was equally unreliable, but had the audacity to proclaim that “Support is open 24/7” when clearly it wasn’t.
Technical assistance was frankly insulting, none of my questions were ever fixed, ranging from the fairly simple task of adding an additional domain (something they advertised as a selling point of the hosting plan), to the apparently more demanding option of using PHP 5 and not 4. This request went unanswered for several weeks, before some made up nonsense about limitations with shared servers- (I have since checked with experts in the field of server management who confirm that Electric Kitten’s excuses were as transparent as an invisible roll of cellophane).
When my renewal fee came up in February 2008, I was somewhat preoccupied with my real, offline life so despite my reservations I stumped up the costs for another years hosting with Electric Kitten, however by May the reliability of the service had got increasingly worse and so I decided it was time to move on, and I closed my account. This is where you would expect the story to end, but oh no… we’ve barely even begun!
“No” Apparently Means “ehh… what?”
So in late May 2008, I contacted Electric Kitten’s billing department to close my account and requested a refund seeing as how I had paid for a year, but was only going to use about three months of it.
Electric Kitten Hosting (Staff) Posted On: 15 May 2008 03:25 PM
Sorry to see you go and thank you for the words but unfortunately we can’t give you a prorated refund for your services. Sorry. This is the only step you need to take as we will terminate your account and billing if wished.
Good luck.Kitten Support Tech.
Needless to say I was somewhat annoyed that I was not going to get a refund, but I accepted that the matter was closed so I confirmed my wishes to cancel my account and I thought was the end of the matter. I deleted my files from my Electric Kitten FTP account, (which was deactivated a few days later), and my site was then hosted by the Australian company Segment Publishing. I had no major complains with Segment Publishing, who were extremely polite and professional in all my dealings with them and I only left their services when, (at that time), the strength of the British Pound against the US Dollar was such that I was able to get a good deal with my current hosts MediaTemple, who I highly recommend.
So this was the situation as I understood it- I was a former customer of both Electric Kitten and Segment Publishing, and a current customer of MediaTemple. However, in late November 2008, I received an automated email from Electric Kitten:
Hello Adam Wilcox,
This is a notice that your invoice 3350 has been generated for services by Electric Kitten Hosting on 11/27/2008.
Total Due: $60.00 Due Date: 12/06/2008
We will process your credit card shortly and you will see a charge from Electric Kitten Hosting for this transaction.
This was obviously something of a surprise to me, as I was under the impression I was no longer their customer, and had closed my account with them over a year ago. I contacted the sales team, pointing out that I would not be paying the requested $60.00 due to the fact I was no longer a customer and I had closed my account. Then things started getting weird.
30 Nov 2008 01:43 PM
Hello Adam,
Per our agreement you need to cancel service prior to renewal data, not after invoice was issued. You are still responsible for the invoice. Please review our terms that you agreed on upon sign up for our services. Your account will be forwarded to collections in case of no payment and you may be responsible for additional finance and collection charges.
Tom J. Jones, Electric Kitten Support01 Dec 2008 01:33 AM
Tom,
You state “Per our agreement you need to cancel service prior to renewal data, not after invoice was issued.” Well, I requested the closure of my account in May.
The original ticket id is: (redacted), dated 15 May 2008, and in it you say: “… Sorry to see you go and thank you for the words but unfortunately we can’t give you a prorated refund for your services. Sorry. This is the only step you need to take as we will terminate your account and billing if wished.”
So as you see, I requested the closure of my account in May, long before this invoice was issued. So I neither intend to pay invoice 3350, nor do I wish to be lied to because apparently “we will terminate your account” actually means you will ignore my wishes and charge me nevertheless.
There was quite a pause before…
07 Dec 2008 04:03 PM
Hello,
I am not sure where this email is from and to who was sent as I can not see it in the system at all. Even if, you should have checked that the service was canceled in the client’s area if you really wished to cancel in May.
Tom J. Jones, Electric Kitten Support
At this point I replied with the full ticket ID details, email header information, ending;
… however, all of this is semantics, the point remains that I requested the accounts closure, I was assured this would be carried out, yet it was not. Looking in my Client area of the support site, I see that my hosting packages are listed as ‘Canceled (sic)’. Can I therefore assume that you agree with my claim that I previously requested closure of my account? If this is the case I would request that my account is removed from the system fully, billing details wiped and so forth.
09 Dec 2008 02:03 PM
You account is suspended for non payment.
Tom J. Jones, Electric Kitten Support
Ah! At last, progress. However I wanted to make sure this matter was cleared up.
09 Dec 2008 02:14 PM
Well, a good start. But I want it fully removed, not suspended. How many times is it going to be necessary for me to explain this point to you? I’ve been incredibly civil thought out this somewhat tedious process, so please, for the last time: I have not used my account since I requested its closure, I do not wish to continue any business with Electric Kitten, I want my entire account removed fully.09 Dec 2008 02:19 PM
Your account will be sent/sold to collection agency unless it is paid in full with 10 days. We will not just “remove it”. You still owe one invoice since you failed to cancel by the agreement terms.
Tom J. Jones, Electric Kitten Support09 Dec 2008 02:59 PM
No I do not owe you anything, I requested the closure of my account in May. I have copies of emails I sent requesting the account closure, and I have replies from Electric Kitten confirming my wishes. I have already given you the content of these emails. Will you not acknowledge that I did indeed request my account to be closed, that I did not wish to continue my hosting with you?
Referring to your own policies: “You may cancel at anytime, though we don’t wish you to!” I did, on 15 May 2008. ”All renewals cancellation request must be submitted at least 30 days prior to the renewal date.” Again, I requested cancellation more than 6 months ago, roughly 180 days. “To cancel your service, please open a ticket at KittenSupport.net and include your domain name, full name, address, payment method and reason for cancellation.” This I did, I have records of it. I have a Ticket ID (redacted), and I have copies of the emails. I have already provided the header information with which you can verify the authentic of the emails. “All cancellations must be done via the support system (KittenSupport.net) to keep a form of record and request. This is for your security and ours.” Again, I have the records to prove it, apparently you do not. If this is an administration error, then that is fine I understand these things happen. But I am not going to pay an invoice for a service I cancelled and have not used for six months.The URL listed in the Ticket is kittensupport.com not .net. In my original email I received, “Welcome to Electric Kitten Hosting!” dated Feb 10th 2007, It gives the support site URL of kittensupport.com. Am I to assume that at some point between then and now the address of your support site had changed and some of the communication was lost? If this is the case, then I think it is reasonable to assume that there was an admin error.
From this point onwards Electric Kitten refused to answer any more emails. Speed forward just under two months later and we arrive at the following situation: I have not, and will not be paying Electric Kitten any money. Electric Kitten’s servers generate an automated email daily telling me I owe them money, Gmail automatically filters these automated emails into the trash.
In summary, as far as I am concerned the Electric Kitten hosting company are unprofessional, and unreasonable. Their administrative blunders have certainly annoyed me, and I wonder if there are any other former customers of theirs who have or are going through the same thing.
I would never, ever recommend their service to anyone- let alone the reliability issues I experienced as a customer. If you have found this story of woe interesting, please link to it to, so that other internet users can read and take heed of this warning.
Update
Electric Kitten are up to the same tricks, charging Tom Geraghty for a hosting account he didn't have. Tom also spoke about it on Audioboo(ed) the episode. If you've had issues with Electric Kitten, get in touch and we'll add your story to the expanding list.