Fatcow.com Hosting recurring charge

Today, 05:05 AM Hello,

I am new here and also purchased hosting for the first time. I choose fatcow.com because i got a offer where I have to Pay 1USD to get hosting for 1 Year.

My problem:
I used my credit card to buy this. Now i am worried that they will use my credit card information to activate any service or product and also will renew after 1 year. But I dont want this. Please help me solving this issue.
This is the email i got from them:
Thank you for your recent purchase at FatCow! Your order
has been processed successfully:

- Order total: 1.00
- Date of purchase: 1/31/2012
- FatCow username: ********

Order details:

Web Hosting Plan - 1 for 12 months

Please note: Most products, including hosting, will renew at the
end of each billing period, and payments will be automatically
processed at that time. For these products, no action will be
required on your part to initiate the renewal.

Today, 05:13 AM First of all raise a ticket with FatCow asking them not to renew your account automatically.
Second call up your Credit Card provider and check if any subscription/ECS mandate has been set up favouring FatCow. If it has been set up, ask them to cancel the same.
Lastly sign up for transaction alerts on your credit card so that you can immediately raise a dispute, if any arises rather than wait for a month end bill.
Today, 05:45 AM $1 usd for 12months?

i share your concern on being automatically charged, and or charged without prior warning or permission. But at $1 for 12months, i would be more concerned about the company still being there in 12months time.

Today, 06:21 AM Well you need to check their TOS on the promotion because I know 1and1 had a similar one for 2 years and you agreed to renew automatically by the end of the promotion. If you rejected the payment or the card was not valid anymore they would send you to a collection agency.

So if you signed up for 1$ for 12 months, take into note that they gave you the service for free, because just to process the payment of 1$ they already probably had a charge of 3% plus 0.50 cents by their merchant account.

This means they earned 50 cents tops with you. And for 12 months of hosting I would ratter say its on their promotions terms that you will need to renew with them.

If not, I would be more worried that you actually gave your CC details to someone offering a 1$ host. Who knows where your card details are now, and if they are not selling your CC details. Because if they don?t agree to renew you after 12 months I don?t see how they could make any profit. 1$ charge is usually just to check if your card was valid.

I don?t think its their case, because I think they are rather known, but im sure their 1$ promo must have some TOS linked to it, where you agree to renew the next year.

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?PingHosters - Expert hosting community for hosters Today, 06:44 AM As nibb says, taking your account off auto-renew and removing your card details is not the same thing as clearing you of any obligation to renew.

Likely as not, you can give them a certain amount of notice before the renewal date, and then you get to cancel the renewal. But you should check their terms of service very carefully to find out how far in advance you must notify them, and what is the correct way to communicate your cancellation notice.

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?? James Oakley, OakHosting.NET | UK Support | US Servers | Pay in ? or $
?? Shared hosting: Affordable. Reliable. Personal Service
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?? 99.9% uptime guarantee. 30 day money-back guarantee. cPanel. Plans start small. Today, 07:09 AM i googled fatcow and found a quote that said "You must choose “transfer a domain” or “register a new domain”"

did you have to transfer your domain name to them to get hosted? you might want that separate in case you have problems later.

in regards to your contract / obligations, all i can find is that its $5.95 per month after the first year, but i couldnt find the TOS that you would have agreed to -> but this is something that should have been considered prior to joining not afterwards.

Today, 04:10 PM Fatcow is one of the companies owned by one big conglomerate that owns about 20 or so hosting companies. They oversell heavily. I had clients that were using them that wanted the heck away from them because of very slow site response. If your site is just html it should be ok but if you're doing a CMS based site, you'll very likely have some very slow load times. I regularly got time outs when trying to work on their sites...

But as for the billing, as long as you remove your credit details, you shouldn't have any worry.

Today, 11:18 PM There's option to disable auto renewal in their control panel.

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