Earthlink Breaking Contract without Warning

The purpose of posting this is expose bad business conduct to possibly help other consumers to avoid suffering from such business behavior.

Earthlink’s hosted www.biyee.net from January 2001 to April 2003. I loved Earthlink and recommended it to many friends because of their reliability and the friendly and prompt response of their customer service whenever it is needed.

However I was extremely disappointed in the middle of May 2003 when I found that Earthlink breached the contract without any warning in advance. When I signed up in January 2001 for hosting www.biyee.net, the disk space quota was more than 100MB. Half a month later, I received a message from Earthlink informing me that disk space was increased to 185 MB. Although biyee.net never used any space remotely close to 185MB, I appreciated this offer. This space was confirmed when I contacted Earthlink’s customer service in November 2002. When I checked the new control center of Earthlink’s web hosting service prompted by a message from Earthlink On May 15, I found that the space has been shrunk to only 20 MB and a warning message said the disk usage had exceeded the quota. When I contacted their technical service, I was told that the upgrading to 185MB two years ago was a system error. Even without the upgrading, the space for biyee.net would be much more than 20 MB. Not a single slighted warning of this breach of contract has been issued. This kind of conduct is unethical! Even companies going bankrupt that cannot fulfill their contracts give their customers warnings in advance.

Five days after I emailed their CEO office regarding this issue (and after posting this note originally), they called me to offer an apology and suggested me to upgrade to a plan that would double the monthly fee. I appreciate this call and hope all I have done will help customers to choose the right service provider or get better service.

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(Originally written on 5/20/2003)