drdeath76

I was wondering if I should blog about this, but decided I might as well.... It all started just over a year ago. I was asked to design a website for a company called Alcatraz Consultants. The website was quickly up and running and they paid me for my design as well as half of the hosting fees as that was "all they could afford". Then 3 months later they asked me to design another site for IDKID .. another one of their ventures operating as a sub-business of Alcatraz. They offered me 10% of the company in exchange for designing and the upkeep of the site and I agreed (and we agreed that they will carry the cost of the hosting) as the offer seemed more than fair it worked quite well till about August (ie it worked well for 2 months) then they started skipping payments. Between August and March they skipped 6 months of payments and sent them an invoice for the hosting every month that got sumarily ignored.....

Skip forward to this month....

I had to renew the hosting for Alcatraz (and half of the hosting was STILL not paid and I got told to simply cancel the site, and I might as well just write off the outstanding money. So I told them IDKID will be taken offline as well if they don't pay me by sunday. Then suddenly they wanted the invoice from the hosting company as all of a sudden my invoices aren't good enough anymore. Now bear in mind they have sold 9 franchises at R160 000 each during the last 6 months... and they owe me just over R2000 but apparently they still don't have money to settle their bill. The whole company runs off the site and the connected e-mails, so I told them one last time.. pay or the site goes down as well as all services pertaining to the hosting. This was once again ignored... so this is what I did ... I replaced all the pages with a page saying "This site is down due to non-payment" and I deleted all the e-mail addresses connected to the site... if the franchises paid or not .. that is not my problem.

So after basically a year of paying for their advertising and business out of my pocket, I put my foot down. Did I do the right thing?

One thing I learned is this ... NEVER do business with a company that claims they do business with christian values .. this is the 3rd time I got burnt by companies like that.. and never ever do work without a deposit or pay hosting before receiving the money first.

PS: I know that R2000 is peanuts and might not be worth it, but considering I only made R6000 all of 2010, that R2000 was a third of my income!!!!