Daniel M.
Terrible billing support
I was recently running a cloud server on Atlantic.net. I had 3 TB of bandwidth included on my server. My server was the victim of some sort of DDoS attack, and I went over my bandwidth cap by about 1 TB. Normally, a TB of extra bandwidth is about $5 - $10 on other providers, but they wanted $27! I was not alerted to this bandwidth overage, I only noticed because I logged into my account. I contacted their billing department, and they told me "Upon review of your account, we see that your server had a TCP reflection attack. Unfortunately, this is due to your server not being properly secured from attacks and Atlantic.Net does not assume liability for such attacks". Their support offered no solution other than to just pay the overage. I don't see how this is my fault as I can't protect my server from DDoS attacks as I have no control over the network. Most providers have some sort of DDoS protection at the network level. I've had similar issues with other providers (namely Digital Ocean), and they agreed to waive the bandwidth fees as it was illegitimate traffic. I didn't expect them to totally waive the fees, but a reduction would be nice. This is a terrible way to treat a customer, especially when other providers would waive the bandwidth fees. I replied to their email on the same day, and I have yet to receive a reply 3 days later. Edit (18/10/23): I received a response from support, and they agreed to provide a $20 credit to offset the bandwidth overages. Support was very understanding and helpful
Response from Atlantic.Net, Inc.Oct 18, 2023
We recently received your feedback regarding your experience with Atlantic.Net, and we wanted to address your concerns. We understand the frustration you experienced due to the unexpected overage fee caused by a DDoS reflection attack affecting your server. As a clarification, the inbound traffic was not the issue; it was the fact that your server was misconfigured to respond to such an attack, greatly increasing its outbound network traffic. While we don't assume liability for such attacks, we value your business and want to find a fair solution. To show our commitment to resolving this issue, we would like to offer you a credit of $20, which will be applied to your account to help offset the overage fee. We hope this gesture demonstrates our dedication to providing exceptional service to our customers. Please reach out directly to [email protected] so we can confirm the credit is being applied to the correct account. We recommend reviewing your server’s local firewall configuration to prevent similar reflection attacks. Additionally, we recommend configuring billing alerts on your account, which will notify you if you approach your specified dollar limit in any given month, helping you avoid unexpected charges in the future. Once again, we apologize for any inconvenience you've experienced, and we appreciate your business. We kindly request that you consider updating your review based on our efforts to address your concerns. If you have any further questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. Thank you for choosing Atlantic.Net.