Automated annual payments for website

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Hi All,

I'm moving some sites from one host to another. This has made me realise how many clients are avoiding paying their annual hosting and maintenance costs!

My own main website isn't C5 but I'm going to convert it in the near future. I have online shopping facilities at present so I'll be adding ecommerce and I know there's a great C5 add on for that.

What I'm wondering is whether I could get the non-paying sites to divert to a payment page on my main site if the customer doesn't pay on time! I know I could do a manual redirect but I'm thinking something automatic so that they would be on instantly and I won't need to intervene.

I used to have several servers running Helm and some plugins to do all this years ago but I've gone out of doing all this full time, I do things on a part time basis and like things to be nice and simple as I get older!

Any ideas?

Cheers
Mike

designserve
 
exchangecore replied on at Permalink Reply
exchangecore
To be honest this seems like bad business practice to me. Telling the world that a client didn't pay the bill is a horrible way to do business in my opinion. Something telling the site owner that they should contact support of they are seeing a certain message is about as far as I would take any kind of public suspension notice, anything else gives whoever is running the site a negative appearance when a slew of innocent things could have happened preventing them from paying (email went to spam, they changed email accounts and never updated their contact info, etc).

My second bit of advice is, don't use c5 for something it isn't made to be used for. C5 is great for many things, but there are much better tools out there for managing web hosting that do what you are asking right out of the box.
designserve replied on at Permalink Reply
designserve
Probably you're right. I value what you've said and it's probably not
something to manage with C5. Just to explain further I'm talking about
people who are really taking advantage of my good nature... I'm getting
wound up looking at three active sites sites who have been regularly
invoiced, I've spoken to them nicely on the phone a few times and they have
still not paid for over 18 months.... I think I will just redirect them to
my home page and see what transpires.


On 27 April 2014 02:22, concrete5 Community <discussions@concretecms.com>wrote:
exchangecore replied on at Permalink Reply
exchangecore
For what it's worth, typically cPanel (and many other web hosting control panels) simply display an account suspension page. This causes the client site to cease to function.

One disadvantage you may want to think about with redirecting your clients to your website, is google may (or may not) see your site as somewhat hostile. It is quite possible that your clients will have SEO suffer, and your site may take an impact as well, though i'm not an expert on the latest SEO algorithms out there. Just food for thought.
designserve replied on at Permalink Reply
designserve
That's a good point, thank you.


On 27 April 2014 03:29, concrete5 Community <discussions@concretecms.com>wrote: