Afrihost's misleading advertising

11 June 2018

I have been an Afrihost customer for about 8 years. I’ve always been satisfied with their service. However, we decided to try to upgrade our account from a 4 mb/sec ADSL service to their 120 GB/Month WiFi service. The promotion was for three free months. We signed up for the service on 14 March. Now, I’m not sure how you do your maths, but to me, three months would end on 14 June. Do you agree? To put this another way, 120 GB/Month times 3 = 360 GB. We received 60 GB in March, 120 GB in April and 120 GB in May. Does your math = 300 GB like mine does?

Then on 1 June the real fun began. Afrihost attempted to debit my bank account for the full month’s cost of R1715. Since, we weren’t anticipating paying this charge, I didn’t have enough money to cover the expense. I then got an email from Afrihost stating that our account was in arrears and that it would be suspended on the 9th. Since we had already determined to go with another provider when the 3 free months ended, we just asked Afrihost to cancel our account. That occurred on 2 June. Had Afrihost cancelled the account as requested and assuming we’d used 4 GB of data (120/30) on the first, they would have “lost” 4 GB of data even though they’d still not have fulfilled their original promise of 360 GB. But they didn’t. Instead they ran us around for a week.

On 9 June they finally suspended services. Assuming we’d used our 4 GB per day for the 8 days of June we’d still not have received the full 360 GB promised. We again tried in vain to explain how unfair we felt the system was. I was told that the T’s and C’s clearly stated that three months meant three months beginning from the first of the month no matter when we actually signed up and in spite of the fact that they only issued us 60 GB for March. Anyone feel my frustration here? I then asked him to cancel the account effective immediately. He explained that we couldn’t cancel the account since it was in arrears. This meant that I had to go on to Client Zone with internet that I no longer had to pay a bill for services I did not receive so that I could cancel the service. Does that make any sense to anyone?

Business is driven by customer satisfaction not by T’s and C’s. Any business who is unwilling to go out of its way (and it wasn’t much out of its way on the 2nd) to satisfy a customer should not expect to stay in business long. I wish I could say this has a happy ending but it doesn’t. I was bul**** into paying a bill for service I didn’t want. That is not a company I can recommend to any of my friends.