Advance renewal notice

[Eidolon]

Would it be possible to have an advance notification of renewals for hosting/domains to be sent around 45 days before it is due for renewal.

I'm not sure how much notification is supposed to be given however receiving notification about 3 weeks prior to a domain expiring and the 'invoice due' date being set for only a few days after notification (according to the members login section) isn't helpful in my opinion. Whilst relatively short notification is fine when it is your own personal website hosting it isn't as easy when you're maintaining the website hosting on behalf of a third party.

Fortunately in my case I'll hopefully be meeting the person this evening, and I'm fairly certain they'll renew. Though last time it took me a while to get payment from them, thus if I'd had prior notice I would have contacted them sooner.

[eUKhost.com]

If you get 45 days time then you may not take the first notification so seriously. other problem in doing so is that we have same billing system for all customers and all packages so for someone on monthly plan will get second renewal notification on the day he gets an account with us.

Earlier we were sending invoice notifications 30 days prior to renewal but we had many many tickets from angry customers saying that it was a bad policy to make them pay 1 month in advance. We made a template in our helpdesk for such customers as everytime we needed to explain them that their account wont be suspended till the due date and invoice notification was sent in advance to allow them time to pay.

[avatari]

Ha! Some people are so bloody ungrateful. I personally, like Eidolon, would appreciate decent advance notice. It seems like eukhost's past experience with angry customers opening tickets was simply a result of eukhost's courtesy and a few customers' stupidity.

It's a shame that these customers weren't more circumspect before they opened tickets.

Eidolon, one option for you might be to use a domain manager program on your desktop to make sure you don't forget to advise clients to renew. Try http://www.download.com/Domain-Name-...-10604445.html for a free decent manager although just typing in 'free domain manager' on an SE will get you loads of results.

[247h]

Originally Posted by Eidolon

Would it be possible to have an advance notification of renewals for hosting/domains to be sent around 45 days before it is due for renewal.

If you chose to use a different registrar for your domains, one that sends reminders with more advanced notice, then you wouldn't be affected by the constraints of eUKhost's billing system (that Mark has described).

For example, I use GoDaddy as my domain registrar and they send reminder emails to your account email address, the listed domain owner and technical contact email addresses, beginning at 90 days ahead of renewal, then again at 60 days, 30, 15 and finally at 5 days. These reminders inform you whether you have the domain set for auto-renewal or manual.

I believe eUKhost uses eNom for domain registrations and I presume your web hosting account domain is registered with them and has you as domain owner? Aren't you informed in advance by eNom in a similar fashion to GoDaddy, quite separately to your combined eUKhost reminder? Who do you use for registering your customers' domains and aren't you receiving similar notifications for those?

[Hallief3]

1&1 send renewals 49 days before expriery....as i recently found out

[Eidolon]

Originally Posted by Hallief3

1&1 send renewals 49 days before expriery....as i recently found out

A similar thing with UKReg which gives due to storing card details has an option to 'automatically renew' in it's advance emails.

It would be nice if the 'date due' set of bill paying was the date that the website hosting expired (or even 5 days prior) than being almost the next day. For instance I've currently got the following...
Date created: 2007/05/08
Date due: 2007/05/09
Website expires (based on date of last years' invoice): 2007/05/23

Date created: 2007/05/13
Date due: 2007/05/14
Website expires (based on date of last years' invoice): 2007/05/29
...whilst they were sent out 15 days prior it's not much of a surprise that they are now being marked as 'overdue'. Whilst I do intend to pay up it would be nice if the 'date due' was set a bit more sensible. Off hand I think 30 days notice is fairly standard with many companies, so I'm slightly surprised that some people have complained.

@avatari: I think I've going to enter the renewal dates into my Google Calendar, should save on headaches next year.

EDIT: At work we issue invoices at the end of each month and most have 30 days in which to pay up before becoming overdue. Some businesses have more efficient accounts departments than others when it comes to paying bills within a short time period.

Thankfully though the resellers' account we have at work will go via our accounts department I can usually get hold of the MD's credit card to pay for online purchases myself, and just leave the invoice in accounts for them to match later against the CC statement.

[eUKhost.com]

Enom has got better automation than any other registrar and its next to impossible for anyone else to provide as many features as Enom has got.

We were working on getting ICANN accreditation but to make something similar to enom will cost Millions and its not worth to have 2 - 4 features and become a registrar. If you cannot be the Best then go with the rest

[DPS Computing]

Very true. If you can't beat them, join them .

That tactic works very well in business as long as you can get them to join you, which in this case you have .

[helloworld]

I wonder if it would be possible to have an automatic renewall option - this happened with my last hosting company - it may already be an option with eUKHost that I haven't seen...

[eUKhost.com]

You can pay us for as many years you want to renew your domain. We can renew your domain name for next 15 years if you want.

auto renewal wont be possible through our billing system as we don't charge your card automatically. You can have another option in place of this which which would be account credit. We can generate a credit invoice for you which will take care of renewal of your domain name every year as long as the credit lasts.

[DPS Computing]

I know, I keep worrying about forgetting my renewal date for things!! I have it etched into my memory now!!