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Do you prefer to pay your web hosting bills manually or automatically?



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Do you prefer to pay your web hosting bills manually or automatically?

For a lot of things, paying bills automatically such as by standing order with your bank or a recurring subscription can save you the time of having to make that payment yourself. But there are times when the bill amount can be "questionable" and might not necessarily be the correct amount that you need to pay. Electric and gas provider companies are infamous for this! I've often received bills for gas and electric that didn't seem to tally up with my regular bill or how much I usually pay. So I've had to contact them to question it and sometimes they've been wrong! And I subsequently was given a refund.

Sometimes bills are the same price every month. Such as your Internet (broadband) or even web hosting bill. That's probably going to be the same every month so may as well be set up via standing order subscription with your bank, building society or other payment handling system like PayPal. But sometimes, you can pay per usage such as with gas and electricity. But many people pay these bills automatically and don't question them. As such, it's reported that many people could be paying more for their gas and electricity than they have actually used!

What about you? Do you prefer to pay all your bills manually? Or do you prefer them to get paid automatically for you each month so you don't have to do it yourself?

It can be more convenient to have your bills paid for you automatically, but it could be that you're paying more than you need to. Do you ever check your usage and then compare this to your bill? Do you ever question it or do you just pay it?

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Everett
I like to pay any type of bill manually. You mentioned how the bills can be wrong, well I just experienced an issue yesterday regarding my internet bill. You see, a couple of months ago, we got a bundling service (TV/Internet/Phone). The technician came and installed the wrong equipment, and the equipment they installed was faulty.

We had to send this equipment back, and they sent us the correct equipment based on our plan. However, on the bill it still indicated that we had services that we didn't. So we had to contact their support to get the bill straightened out. Since we do bills manually, it was easier to see a comparison of how much we were owed in credit because we still paid the bill amount even though we weren't suppose to have some of the services that were on the bill.

Long story short, if I was to pay this bill automatically, and not really see what services were on there, this error would've most likely never been found.



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Lynne
I like to pay all my bills manually. I just feel happier that way knowing I can check everything myself. A lot of companies just take a chance.

Take our water bill for example. We have lived at the same address for about 4 years. Our water bill every month is about the same for a while, and then it starts climbing steeply over a period of time until it is not reasonable or possible to be that amount. I then go and check the water meter which is accessible to the municipality and it has become completely overgrown and covered in sand. It is literally buried with grass growing over it. I then ask the municipality if they check the meter and they say yes they have. I then take a photo to then and ask them how they can check the meter... then they come and dig it up, check the meter and refund the overcharge and then a few months down the line we just go on repeat.

Shocking thieves.



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Everett
Corporations think they can get away with those actions. It's very depressing as well. You think a large corporation, especially an energy one would be more careful, actually check meters, and not just guess how much energy your home is using. They probably just averaged it out based upon your previous bills during this time, and some energy companies actually do that. I know this because our energy bill actually ran up a little and kept going up, and we were using way less energy than before (thanks to energy star and tips to get energy bill down) and they just immediately thought they will go back and charge us the amount, or around the amount from before... i don't think so!



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Lynne
Well here in South Africa we have a number of companies that have a monopoly so we have no choice but to use them no matter what type of service (or lack thereof) they give. We only have one power company and that is Eskom. We get ripped off constantly if we don't watch them and the cost of power just increases constantly. On top of that they can't even meet the needs of our country. We regularly have what is called load shedding. Last winter every single town in our country had load shedding almost every single day. That is where they cut the electricity to towns in turn for a few hours every day. And they bill the living daylights out of us? Imagine running a company when every single day you don't have any power for 2 - 4 hours a day depending on how bad the power shortages are? This is staff just sitting there doing nothing while you pay their salaries!



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Everett
What?! I guess this picture taken by a drone actually sums a lot of things up:

Do you prefer to pay your web hosting bills manually or automatically?

You may have seen this picture before, or know where this was taken since you live in South Africa. The picture depicts the poor/rich divide in South Africa. I wonder if those, the ones that have pools in their backyard receive a better service from mentioned company? Or if they have their power turned off for hours at a time?



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Lynne
This picture sums it up perfectly in a way... but it would be interesting for you to actually zoom in closer. You will see that loads of the shacks where the "poor" people live have satellite dishes for DSTV. And they often don't pay for rent, water, electricity or municipal services... the people with the houses on the left pay taxes which ultimately pay for everyone living on the right.
I have spoken to loads of people that are quite well off that live in settlements and they choose to live there instead of renting a home simply because they can just keep most of their salary and not spend it.

Yes there are a lot of very poor people too, but you should go inside some of those shacks. A lot of them are kitted out better than my house with big screen tvs, surround sound, you name it!

But to answer your question I doubt they get better service. The service here in general just sucks, and that is the end of it.

Our government is corrupt and our leaders don't care about the people that are genuinely poor and suffering. Our president, Jacob Zuma is robbing our country blind and then you see things like this picture. Where is all the housing our government promised its people more than 20 years ago?

It makes me really angry.



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MasterA
With web hosting, most of the time the monthly costs are fixed so automatic payment shouldn't cause much problems. However, I prefer manual payment to make sure that the prizes don't rise and this allows me to use different payment sources in case, I run low on money on one of my accounts. I don't like using direct debit; I prefer using PayPal subscription payments because I can easily stop payments online. With direct debit, things can be a bit complicated. I prefer being safe so I always use manual payment. The problem is sometimes you may forget but I got good memory so it works for me.



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Lynne
Yes I've noticed Paypal has a lovely feature where you can see all the authorized payments listed and it is easy to cancel them too. I've also had someone take money off my account when they had no right to. Yes they were listed as an authorized company on Paypal but they just deducted money when they shouldn't have. I sent Paypal a quick query and within 24 hours it was resolved and Paypal refunded the money.

I was very impressed. I know for a fact if that had gone of my bank account it would have been a very different story and I might never have been able to get that money back.



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EliteWriter
As a general rule of thumb I always pay bills manually, whatever bills they are. I prefer it that way as I make it a point to check if everything is in order before effecting the payment. Besides I can get to choose which payment method to use as on one particular month I would want to pay from one payment source, but the following month I might prefer to use another one.
It could be a bit more time consuming to pay bills manually, but considering the above factors, and being a control freak I prefer it that way.



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Lynne
Yes I am also a bit of a control freak! I also like the freedom to change which payment method to use each month.



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TommyCarey
For my web hosting, or anything to do with my websites, I like to have my bills paid automatically so that nothing goes down because I forgot to pay for it. When you have a ton of websites, it's hard to keep track of all their billing dates while you're also trying to make money.

My hosting plans are all set up on annual billing just so I can save some extra cash because if I were to pay month to month I'd just pay more than I should have.

My domains are set to auto renew for 1 year, every year, so that I don't lose anything. A few of my websites are pretty popular so I'm sure they're on a watch list and if they ever went inactive I would have to buy them back from someone who sniped it. And I wouldn't be paying $35 for it, I'd probably have to pay $3,000 or more.

Any software I use I have an automatic subscription for as well. Now this is different than hosting or domains because I won't lose anything, I'll just have to set it back up if I forget Do you prefer to pay your web hosting bills manually or automatically? The only down side is that some software and services have an activation fee or "setup fee" which are ridiculous, but you have to pay them in order to play Do you prefer to pay your web hosting bills manually or automatically?

If I'm using a service that doesn't have a set up fee I'll just pay for the first month and see how it goes. If it works well then I'll set up automatic payments so it's easier for me to just use it and not worry about the service cutting out.

If I'm paying a water bill, heating bill, electricity bill, sewage bill, etc. I'll have them set to manual payments so I can review each bill to make sure I'm not getting charged more than I should.



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Everett
Bill here, bill there.. so many bills! too bad there is no system to tally the total of the bill and pay it all at once and have the payments go to where they need.. we need this!



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Lynne
Yes I hate bills time and making all the payments. It would be nice to have a way to have it all done in one go, nice and easy.



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ajlancer
HI idealmike thanks for your question. I think automatically bill payment system has both sides, I mean advantages and disadvantages. Advantages mean you do not need to tension to payment bill in the due time and it will deduct from your existing account without notice. On the other hand disadvantage is like you prepare to pay bill on 7 June but system automatically deduct on 6 June, it is meaning that you will lost your preparation. May be you thought that you will use same amount to other way. Besides, others utility bills and web hosting bills are not same. Because, utility bills like gas, electricity or water bills is uncertain amount for each month but web hosting bill always same. So, you can paid it automatically. So, I prefer auto payment more than manually. Because, I need to pay any how today or tomorrow.

Regards by Ajlancer



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ShwetaPrasad
It depends which suites more, whichever way you want to prefer.



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Soulwatcher
I prefer auto billing, I font want to have to sit there and mess with manual billing every month. Having said that my website is paid for a year and I don't have to worry about billing for another 10 months. =)



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augusta
I prefer to pay my bills manually, so as to be in the know what I'm paying before paying with a standing order, the will be no questioning even if it the wrong amount because the banks are just to help one pay not to question to find out the true state of payment.So manually works better for me.



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Corzhens
When my husband was managing the website of their office, he requested to pay the bill automatically so that there will be no need to prepare the check payments every 3 months. But the hosting provider preferred to pick up the check from their office so you cannot quarrel with that. Sometimes the messenger would be delayed in coming for the check so it is to the disadvantage of the hosting company.



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