subject: All About Web Hosting Money Back Guarantee [print this page] When signing up for a web hosting account, it's important for the hosting company to offer you a full money back guarantee. The duration for the guarantee varies. Most offer 30 day money back guarantee. That means if you can not satisfied with the service, you can always ask for a full refund. The company must honor your request. Some companies even go as far as offering 45 day guarantees.
The guarantee is in place to protect the consumer. Obviously, nobody wants to pay for something that they are not happy with. The guarantee allows the customer to try out the service for a reasonable period of time with no zero risk. Within this window, customers must do all they can to assess the hosting service. For instance, is the support helpful when there is a problem? Do they respond to emails promptly? More importantly, are the servers susceptible to frequent downtime? If so, you may wish to send an email ticket to request for your money back.
Good hosting companies should offer money back guarantees because they must be able to back up the guarantee with excellent services. Otherwise, they may be losing customers. The guarantee is an indication of the confidence level of the service provider. That is why the better companies offer 45 day guarantee instead of the usual 30 day. If the services are great, the guarantee doesn't really matter. Customers want to stay with the company! No one really wants to terminate the services of a great hosting company.
The guarantee period can also be viewed as a free look window. Within this window, customers are free to try out and assess the services. Beyond the window, the assumption is that customers are happy with the services, and would like to remain as a paying customer. If, during the period of assessment, anything is discovered to be unsatisfactory, the guarantee can be activated any time.
Sometimes, the policy allows customers to abuse the hosting service. Customers deliberately find fault with the services in order to request for a refund. Fortunately, over 98% of the customers are genuine customers who want to continue using the services. The risk reversal guarantee is seldom activated.
Before activating the guarantee, be sure to communicate with the hosting company. Sometimes, problems occur due to misunderstandings. For instance, you may sign up with a hosting company during a maintenance period. A notice has been sent out earlier to inform all customers of the upcoming maintenance. Unfortunately, you signed up after the notice has been sent out. So you didn't receive a copy of the notice. The server went down for a couple of hours as anticipated. But because you never received the notice, you assume (falsely) that the servers are unstable.
If there are problems, try to work them out with the support department. Most companies offer instant chat nowadays, so you shouldn't have to wait long for someone to help you with your problems. Most of the time, you find that the support staff are more than happy to help you out. Once your problems are solved, you don't have to worry about money back guarantees anymore!
