I see two sides here. First, to get in the right frame of mind consider
a punter who signs up for a monthly recurring membership at your site.
Let's say you have really unique content and charge $60 / month.
The punter joins on Oct 1st, then on January 5th he says he wants
to cancel and he does not want to be charged for the rest of January.
He didn't cancel before the January bill was due, so he has to pay
for January, right? (You might be nice and refund him, but you don't
have to.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by boneprone
I signed the contract on Oct 22, 2004.
Canceled in November.
They kept billing me for that month, the next and the next few after I canceled.
Then slapped on this Termination fee of 5k
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Under the contract you posted and said you signed, you signed up for
an annually recurring deal, just like the punter you signs up for a monthly
recurring deal. You contract runs for a year from oct. 22nd each year.
According to what you just said your contract runs for a year from Oct. 22nd
each year and you owe them. You signed a contract the recurred yearly.
You didn't cancel before it renewed, so you had another one year contract.
That's the contract you signed. This is why we don't sign year long
contracts.
That said, the question is DAMAGES - by breaking your year long
contract, how much did you cause them to lose? Most places have
specific laws about leasing real estate such as homes and apartments
for a year. They say that although you have a one year lease, if you
break that contract the law limits the
damages. Typically if you
break your lease you owe 1 1/2 month's rent, or until the apartment
is rented to a new tenant. Rental contracts often call for more, saying
you owe for the whole year, but the law says otherwise. Why? Because
the landlord can rent that apartment (or server) to someone else, thereby
recouping some of the money they lost when you broke the contract.
In fact, they have a legal duty to try to rent it out or otherwise limit their
damages. Were you to go to court, you could bring up the question of
damages, asking how much Jupiter actually lost when you left, assuming
they rented that server out to someone else as soon as practicable.
You could say that we need to look to the statutes for a guideline as
to reasonable damages, then ask the judge to take judicial notice of
the laws limiting damages regarding broken leases. Reasonably, you
could be expected to compensate Jupiter in an amount equal to 1-2
months of fees since you broke the contract.
Legalisticly, another question is the transferability of the contract.
Is Jupiter a corporation and did you have a contract with that corporation?
If so, the fact that the corporation has new stockholders doesn't effect
your contract. On the other hand, if their was no corporation, your contract
may have actually been with Lensman and the others. The deal was that
those guys would provide hosting with their own level of professionalism
and you may not have to accept the substitution of hosting by some other
people who provide the service with a different level of professionalism.
You don't have a contract with the new owners and they old contract
may not be transferable - unless the contract says it's with Jupiter
Inc.
Even if it is a deal with Jupiter Inc., you have another way to go. If I sign a
record contract with Madonna's Management, Inc., to have Madonna do
an album, they can't have Miley Cyrus do the album instead. I signed up
for a album by Madonna, and one by Cyrus isn't the same. If you had regular
contact with Jupiter staff ad had them do work beyond just housing the server,
ad if the new owners got rid of all the old staff, they may have been the ones
to break the contract. Your deal was to have hosting like the old Jupiter
provided, with Bobby the Super Tech managing your server or whatever.
When they got rid of the good staff and had Cluless Curtis trying to admin
your server, they were the ones who didn't hold up their end of the deal.
The main point, though, is that you signed a contract which renewed yearly
and you didn't cancel it before it renewed, so now you owe them some
reasonable amount of money unless they somehow violated the deal first.
That's why you don't sign year long contracts for things that can be done
monthly. The only reason I can see that a host would insist on a year long
contract is because they already know you'll probably want to leave after a
couple months. (Unless of course you're leasing specialized hardware that
they have to buy specially for you, in which case a year is reasonable but
it shouldn't renew). That, I think, is the root cause of the problem - you
screwed up by signing a yearly renewing contract and they aren't being
nice about letting you out of the deal. They may be being unreasonable if
$5,000 is more than two month's hosting costs, but you gt yourself into it
by signing the yearly contract, then more so by not paying attention to
when you could cancel.