Afrihost has become just another ISP , and maybe one of the worst

A number of years ago I became an Afrihost ADSL customer. I was very happy with the service I received from their support, and the pricing was really attractive as well.

The trouble started when MTN bought them up. The service level dropped immediately, but that was to be expected, and nothing else really got worse. When the management buy-back happened, I thought everything would get better again. How wrong I was! Support levels were reduced even further, temporarily offset by pricing gimmicks that were not sustainable. Since I didn't need much support, I wasn't too concerned though.

In early September, I signed up for their fibre offer, but with the proviso that I first needed to know how much the installation costs for the additional distance to my house would be. When I placed the order, I got an instant automatic response that I placed an order. I immediately phoned Afrihost, and a nice lady assured me that I would only get charged when I actually had a working fibre connection, and that OpenServe would come by and give me a quote within the next 2 to 4 weeks. That was fine, but I was a bit surprised when I received the router that was part of the offer a couple of days later. Since I wasn't sure that the connection costs would be reasonable, I decided to not even open the package.

Last week I sent an email to Support, asking for a status update since 3 months is a lot longer than the 2 to 4 weeks I was told about. I got a standard response saying that there will be no fibre installations between 10 December and 16 January. I had already seen that on the Afrihost website, and of course, this was not an answer to the question I had asked. I sent another email to support, and told them exactly that. The next response was that my order was a "pre-order" since there was no fibre in my area, yet. That is nonsense as fibre cables were laid over a year ago, and was confirmed by the area check on the Afrihost website already in September. The most useful information in the response was cancellation instructions for the order, which I duly followed. That was on 10 December.

At that stage I decided that I should inform Gian Visser, the Afrihost CEO, of my unhappiness, and the drop in the Afrihost support levels. Gian has been sending me friendly emails every so often, either containing his latest sales pitch, or explain what problems Afrihost was facing. Naturally, ********** is just a mailbox, and I got another automated response that was useless.

Afrihost then charged my credit card for the router. I immediately sent off an email to accounts, saying that I had not agreed to the charge, and that they could pick up the router at anytime. 2 days later, I'm still waiting for a response, so I called them. I was told that the charge would only be reversed once they had received the router back, and was given instruction on how to return it on their website. In the comment section I said that I was not willing to pay for collection costs as I had not asked them to send me the router before my order was confirmed, but in order to make the return process work I also had to tick a box saying that I had to pay for shipping costs.

Guess what, shortly afterwards my credit card was for R99 for delivery costs!

So all you people out there shopping for an ISP, beware of the promises and sales talk you get from Afrihost! The new Afrihost is not what they were a few years ago!!!