be paid in advance and, by the way, any other hosting provider has the same policies regarding payments. In good time prior to the renewal of a service, we send out payment reminders via e-mail. If there is no active billing agreement, like in your case, these e-mails are sent out daily, and you received the first one 11 days before the actual renewal date. After the renewal of your service and with the payment still outstanding, in the first instance we suspended access to your server. Afterwards, we sent out even more e-mails, informing you about the missing payment and the risk of data loss due to the pending contract termination. Since we did neither hear anything from you, not even a short reply asking for a grace period, for example, nor receive your payment, we had to assume that you were no longer interested in using our services and consequently deleted your server.

In total, you received 15 e-mails from us over the course of almost 3 weeks. It is not true that we carelessly delete accounts. Quite the contrary, we contact our customers several days before the renewal of a subscription and let them know about their upcoming duties, like sending a required payment. In case one faces issues with a payment, it is always possible to contact us, and we happily grant a grace period of a couple of days, allowing our customers to sort out these problems. However, without ever receiving any notification at all, we had to assume that the service was no longer needed.

Our customers are responsible not only for the server usage but also for their own data, which involves the action of taking data backups regularly. We are awfully sorry to say that we do not keep backups of customers’ data since we consider them to be private, and for this reason we are not even allowed to store them. As per contractual terms taking data backups is in the full responsibility of our customers. Over a course of a long period we communicated the risk of data loss to you, but there was no reaction, unfortunately. We really regret that you do not have own backups and thus cannot restore your data.

It is true that you sent us an inquiry a couple of weeks earlier about the possibility to suspend services which are currently not needed, with an option to reactivate them at a later point in time. We replied to you that it is unfortunately not possible to “pause” a subscription. You knew about this circumstance a long time before the latest renewal of your service and, consequently, you should have had enough time to take adequate measures, like for example creating backups of your data.
Again, we would like to stress, we always communicated clearly without ambiguity since it was our only goal to avoid the scenario which unfortunately became reality anyway.

We are sorry that there obviously was a misunderstanding. Still, we wish you all the best and much success with your projects.

Best regards,

Your team at Contabo