Shame on you, Kinsta!

Feedback
1

On 8 October, I received an email informing me that the payment had been overdue for the past three attempts and that I had 12 days to pay for my hosting. Fair enough.

On 13 October, I received confirmation of payment. As I only have one account, I believed everything was fine.

However, on 18th October, my account was suspended, well before the overdue date announced on 8th October.

I immediately checked the payment confirmation email, which seemed to indicate a Kinsta glitch as the total paid was 0. I then paid the overdue invoice, and am still waiting more than 24 hours later for someone to reactivate my plan. It seems like they can deactivate plans at the weekend, but they are unable to reactivate them, so I have to wait until Monday.

Shame on you, Kinsta.

Regards,

Matteo Festorazzi

2

This is the email cronology, just in case someone wants to check how do they handle communications. But they spam very well my mailbox. So stupid!

3

Hi @Kezers,

Welcome and thank you for reaching out to us on the Kinsta Community forums.

I am sorry to hear that this billing issue occurred on your Kinsta company. I certainly understand that you were not expecting to have your services suspended, and the impact this can cause.

I understand that you have reached out to our Billing team, but didn’t receive an immediate reply. Our Billing team is available Monday - Friday 6am to 11pm UTC and they do followup as soon as possible to each ticket received.

I have reviewed this matter further and I do see that services have been restored at this time and your sites are live and accessible again.

I have also reached out to you directly via email with more details regarding this matter. If you do have any further questions please do not hesitate to reply to my email. We are more than happy to discuss things further and help clarify anything you may still have questions about.

If there is also anything else we can help with please don’t hesitate to start a conversation with our Support team. We are always standing by and more than happy to help.

Best regards

4

Hello @Andrew, I would like to know the exact reasons why:

  • I received a wrong payment confirmation by email.
  • The account was suspended on the 10^(th) day, not the 12^(th) as mentioned in the email.
  • The account can be suspended at the weekend, but not reactivated at the weekend.

I would also like to know what Kinsta will do to avoid this happening again.

5

Hi @Kezers, thank you for your reply.

I have raised your question about why you received what maybe an incorrect payment confirmation by email with our Billing team. They will be following up as soon as possible to discuss that further.

Regarding your question about service suspensions on the weekend, we are actually able to reactive services on weekend days. As long as any past due invoice is paid, and a plan is in place and also paid in full then our Support team can reactivate services.

To prevent this from occurring again in the future we will ensure that this is communicated with our Support team so every one is fully aware they can reactivate services in those cases.

I will be following up via email to discuss your question about the day your service was suspended.

Best regards

7

Thank you for your response. I appreciate that you are trying to clarify the situation.

I’m really sorry that Kinsta did not notify me of the suspension. Kinsta suspended the service without informing me. It’s unbelievable that Kinsta is not interested in notifying customers about such legitimate but extreme action.

Once I noticed my websites were down, I immediately paid, but nothing happened for the next 24 hours.

I did not even receive a message informing me that I had to contact someone to have my profile reactivated.

This same company is very good at sending worthless messages, but nothing is invested in keeping customers active and informed with clear, honest and precise communication.

How can Kinsta expect me to forgive such horrible behaviour?

8

Hello there :waving_hand:

Our Billing team has reached out to the owner of your company (I believe you’re listed as the owner) and confirm that this has been resolved.

Once again we are sorry for any inconvenience. For the quickest response time, we advise opening a support chat and we’ll assist you as soon as possible.

Kind regards!

9

Hello @VladimirM until now I didn’t received any email… Can you check if and when the billing team will write me?

10

About the support chat, Kinsta seems introduced so much delay between each steps that I fall a sleep in the meantime. I understand discouraging from open a support chat but this honestly is really a lot!

11

Hello Kezers :waving_hand:
They already wrote back yesterday, there’s a possibility that you’re checking another email. Would you mind that we continue this discussion in private to avoid sharing emails in public?

Feel free to DM me your email address and I’ll cross check it with the one that Billing team sent a message to.

Kind regards,
Vladimir

12

Hello @Kezers :waving_hand:

I haven’t heard back from you and my shift is over, therefore, I won’t see a DM if you send me one now.

It would be best to reach out by opening chat via Mykinsta and our team can give you email transcripts, answer any followup questions, clarify the situation and put you in touch with our Billing team if needed.

Alternatively, email us at support@kinsta.com but please do so from an email address that you used to create a Mykinsta user.

Kind regards!

13

@VladimirM yes someone wrote me.

I was expecting an email from kinsta.com, but instead someone wrote me from kinsta.discoursemail.com

How I am supposed to take in consideration all the emails from a third party? For me is spam.

Anyway they didn’t answer my questions, in particular they said:

As long as any past due invoice is paid, and a plan is in place and also paid in full then our Support team can reactivate services.

How I am supposed to know, after I paid, I also have to contact the support team by chat to reactivate the plan? It doesn’t seem believable there is such a big technological limitation that Kinsta can not do the automatic reactivation.

And also there isn’t any valid reason to not show a banner after the payment to inform the customer.

I believe this is a deliberate decision from Kinsta and I don’t like at all this attitude.

This is the reason I prefer to keep this conversation public. I hope others will join and together will convince Kinsta to change this policy.

15

Hi @Kezers

I have forwarded your concern to our billing team. They will email you to further clarify why your plan wasn’t reactivated after you made the payment. I hope that once you receive our email, it will clear things up.

Please note that the email will come from @kinsta.intercom-mail.com.

Best,

17

Hello @Kezers :waving_hand:

I just wanted to follow up in regards to this whole situation. I am sorry for all the back and forth, but it seems that the emails our Billing team sent didn’t reach you and that they were hard-bounced by our chat/email system provider. We worked with them and that should be resolved now. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.

Our Billing team has sent a follow-up in regards to the invoices, so please let me know if you’ve received it and if you were able to continue the conversation in regards to this situation with them.

If not please, let me know so we can check further and resolve the issue so you would be able to communicate with us via email as well.

Please feel free to let me know if you need anything else :folded_hands:

18

Hey @Adrian_L and @VladimirM,

I really appreciate the transparency you are showing. This morning, I received an email from kinsta.intercom-mail.com in which your colleague said that they had sent me an email on the 16^(th) regarding the plan suspension. I didn’t receive this email, so I asked for more information.

Of course, if emails are coming from third-party domains, Kinsta doesn’t have full control, which is problematic for such critical communications.

Honestly, I expect a stricter policy from Kinsta regarding the security and reliability of communications, and at the moment I’m very critical.

19

Thanks for writing back @Kezers :folded_hands:

I am glad to hear that you were finally able to get in touch with our Billing team. We apologize once again for the inconvenience and we’ll be making sure to check for such a deliverability issues in the future.

Kind regards :waving_hand:

20

Hello @VladimirM, the Billing team only contacted me via chat. I still haven’t received any emails from kinsta.com. The only email I received was a notification from a third-party domain about an open chat, which frankly doesn’t seem sufficient to me.

As I said, I don’t consider any third-party sender reliable, especially because, as far as I know, Kinsta doesn’t publish information about reliable domains. This is why I don’t open and click on links in emails from unknown senders randomly, do you?

How am I supposed to know that kinsta.intercom-mail.com is an official domain and not kinsta.intercom-mail.xxx or kinsta.intercom-mail.yyy, for example?

How does Kinsta expect me to accept emails from any third party? It’s unbelievable to me.

In any case, the Billing Team has not yet provided proof that they sent me an email; they only provided a screenshot, but my system logs show that I never received the email. I hope it’s not from a new third-party domain I don’t know…

Last but not least, nobody has explained to me how I was supposed to know that, after paying, I had to contact the support team and ask them to reactivate my plan.

Come on guys, I feel like you’re just trying to avoid answering me because you’re embarrassed to admit that there’s something seriously wrong.

21

Hi @Kezers ,

I apologize if you feel misled; that’s certainly not our intention and we do want to make sure that our processes and how we function is clear. We have publicly-available documentation here on how our failed-payment process works for more details: Payment Methods - Failed Payments - Kinsta® Docs

But I would like to provide some more information up-front. While typically reactivation of the account is automatic once there is a successful payment, there are some circumstances that require manual reactivation - most commonly, if the site(s) had to be manually stopped or removed, or if the plan was removed during the process, the plan will need to be added back manually or the sites reactivated manually by our team. In this particular instance, it looks like the plan had to be added back manually, so the sites also needed to be reactivated manually.

I will check with an internal team to see if we can provide the headers from the original email as well; please let us know if you have any other questions.

22

Thank you @jackirish for you answer. I check the link provided and nowhere is written I had to contact the Support team for reactivating manually my plan neither I received any notification about this procedure. I trust Kinsta and I was sure was automatic.

You confirmed the the normal procedure is automatic and in particular circumstances it’s not. I assume this exception might be considered a technical issue since is not a normal procedure reported in any documentation available on Kinsta website.

This said I’m wondering if is applicable this specific guarantee Kinsta offer:

I hope yes, and this surely might help to clarify was not my mistake, I did nothing wrong after the payment and Kinsta feel sorry and responsabile for what happened, not just with words.

We customers need to trust Kinsta and solving this incident in a positive way is really important for all the community.

23

Hello Kezers :waving_hand:

Thank you for your reply.

I understand your concerns and that you feel as we have failed you. A trust between our company as a service provider and you as a customer is paramount. With that in mind, I would like to provide a summary once more so I can clarify what exactly happened and what steps to take next.

The email was bounced back to our Intercom
We have sent you an email and the status on our end shows as delivered. Your email provider has bounced the message back. Given that we use Intercom for direct communication, the sender email will be kinsta.intercom-mail.com. When it’s a message from our service (as in Mykinsta), you will get emails from service@kinsta.com.

This bounce is where the problems started, because you didn’t get the email that your payment has failed. However, the bounce is not a direct fault of Kinsta or Intercom, we can’t see the reason why, but it was your email provider that bounced the message back.

Suspension
Because you didn’t get the message, you didn’t react in time to pay the hosting plan and it was suspended, as per our Terms Of Services. Your reached out to our Support team at 12:47PM UTC on Sunday. Due to the limited availability on weekends (our Billing team official hours are Mon-Fri from 6am to 11pm UTC), the reaction was slower but your services were restored at 5:31PM UTC on the same day.

Automatic restore of the services after payment

As stated, in certain circumstances, the services are not restored automatically, but for more details please contact our Billing team.

Summary

We have been sending messages to you in regards to failed payments, however, you weren’t receiving them due to your email hosting provider bouncing the messages back. While it is an unfortunate situation that we recognize, it it not a direct fault on Kinsta and we reacted as best as we could and as soon as we could.

Furthermore, forum is not where you can get the best help possible. In regards to SLA and requests related to SLA credits, those have to be discussed with our Billing team directly.

Since you have access to the chat and now that emails are not hard bouncing anymore, you will be able to communicate with our Billing team either via chat or email. I see you have an open chat with our Billing team and I will ask them to follow-up with you again and provide them the same summary you received here.

If you have any technical questions or concerns, please open a chat with our Support team.

Kind regards :waving_hand: