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I own a small website hosting and services company. Most of my clients make automatic payments for recurring hosting services.

However, what is the appropriate way to handle customers that have simply moved their hosting elsewhere without any request to cancel services?

  • Do you leave their service running in the event they come back?
  • Do you contact them and let them know that their domains no longer point to your services?
  • Do you contact them and suggest they cancel?

I have opted to contact clients in the past, since I believe that that level of personal service is a key part in growing a small hosting company, but as my business continues to grow, I'm not sure what is the best policy.

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2 Answers

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If the alternative is chargebacks, I would say absolutely. That's pain that you don't want to have to deal with.

Alternatively, if you wanted to try to get them active or find out specifically why they're not (or switched), you should check out what Patrick MacKenzie (patio11) is doing with Lifecycle Emails: https://training.kalzumeus.com/lifecycle-emails

If you're likely to lose these customers anyway, it couldn't hurt giving it a try.

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up vote 3 down vote

These (soon not to be) customers are gold - you should attempt to do whatever possible to contact them and learn the following:

  • why they signed up for your service
  • why they are not using their service
  • what service did they move to
  • what made them select the alternative service
  • did the service meet their expectations.

From there, you gain valuable insight about what your product offering is missing, and objectively prioritize future feature sets.

And yes, I would reimburse their service and attempt to keep an open communication channel with them regarding your future offerings.

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