Beware of OVH Hosting: Fraudulent Commitment Extension

I have several servers with OVH. I had a 12 month commitment for one of them which expired in March.

It doesn’t make much sense to have a commitment because the price is virtually the same. In March I had an issue when I accidentally renewed my server and it got charged again with auto-renewal. I, of course wanted to ask a refund on one of the charges. Any ethical company would refund that. Not OVH.

So to avoid such double charges and with the assumption that my commitment expired, I tried to remove the auto-renewal from that specific server. A generic “We cannot remove the commitment” error message popped up.

I contacted support and asked them to remove that commitment. I still thought it’s a technical glitch. OVH has a lot of glitches so it was a good bet. Technical support told me though that I renewed my commitment for another 12 months. I protested, I did not.

Now they are telling me I should have received an email telling me that I will be recommitting automatically at a certain date. I did not receive those emails. What is the point of a 12 month commitment if they extend it indefinitely? Why don’t they call it an infinite commitment?

So what am I going to do about it? Since I know for sure that this kind of conduct is against consumer protection laws in my country (and probably theirs), I will clean out my servers, cancel everything I can, and block them on Paypal and my credit card company. I suggest you do the same.

There are plenty of alternatives. Digitalocean is my favorite.