EDIT: Full Flavour has now given their undertaking to resolve this matter, and apologised for the mishandling of my account.

I am writing this post as a warning to anyone who may be considering using Full Flavour for any reason whatsoever. This company has provided the worst customer service I have ever experienced from a New Zealand-based company. They have not acted in good faith, and should be treated with extreme caution.

Jesse Archer, the director of Full Flavour, is active on this site as myfullflavour. He has been involved in these matters.

In the interest of keeping this brief, I won't be going in to extensive detail, but obviously some background is required.

I used Full Flavour hosting services for close to two years, with only minor issues. Recently however, I decided to stop hosting hardware with them, and that's when I first encountered serious problems. Lack of communication is the biggest issue, requiring constant follow ups, while receiving inconsistent replies, and a series of broken promises to update tickets or call back with information. Their approach to problems appears to be one of ignoring them, and hoping they will go away.

My primary concern was recovering hardware entrusted to the company. This alone took daily phone calls over a period of weeks, just to get it found and returned. It was, I am told, in their office, where it had been sitting for a month prior to my even finding out it had been disconnected. Fastway subsequently may have misplaced it for two weeks (there is limited evidence of this), but that's not relevant to the Full Flavour experience, except to the extent that again, Full Flavour did nothing to resolve the matter without extensive prompting.

I'm a fairly reasonable person, and give companies a chance to sort things out. Occasionally things go wrong, we're only human after all. Sadly, in this case, the issue goes much further than simply misplacing hardware.

The issue actually stated in October. Unable to submit a ticket through their website (authentication error with their ticketing system, even though I was authenticated in the client area), I tried three times to contact the company, via e-mail, Geekzone (16-Oct-2014 08:53), and telephone. E-mail and Geekzone requests were ignored, and a promised return call was never received.

Due to the availability of suitable fibre plans in my area, I advised the company that I intended to stop using their services, and asked if a pro rata refund was available early termination, and if so, when the end of the current month of service would be so I could to move services prior to that date. I had prepaid for a year of service, the second of which was nearing the end, but they also provide monthly pricing. I was expecting them to decline a partial refund (you don't know if you don't ask), but intended to continue using the service until the end of the pre-paid hosting period if no refund was available.

Early December, I received an e-mail stating that there would be network maintenance that night. The following day, my co-located hardware was inaccessible, and I was forced to relocate the last remaining services that hadn't already been migrated to new hosts. Because I could not log a ticket, I subsequently phoned Full Flavour, and Brendan lodged a ticket for me, requesting a technician investigate.

Given I had already migrated services, and believing I had use of the service until March, I forgot all about the equipment for a month, and it wasn't until I decided to use it again for another temporary purpose, that I realised it had been offline the entire time. After prompting Full Flavour for an update, I was informed by Jesse that the system had been taken offline and boxed up for return in response to my request to terminate the service in October, citing my original e-mail to which no reply was ever received. Jesse also promised to follow the matter up that day. Did he? Who knows... I certainly was never informed of the outcome, and was left to stress for weeks, wondering where my hardware was.

As stated above, no termination request was made in the October e-mail or subsequent to that. Even if I had requested termination of service, there was zero coordination in the form of advising when this would occur, which is the minimum one would reasonably expect when moving hosting services. It is simply inexcusable to terminate hosting without any communication.

In addition to many, many phone calls and requests for updates, most of which resulted in promises to get back to me that never eventuated, I requested a refund for services that were not provided on several occasions, including e-mails to Jesse on February 18 and 26, and most recently to their accounts department, in response to them sending me a bill for the next 12 months of hosting on March 16. A phone call yesterday resulted in my first being told that Jesse was out of the office for another 10-15 minutes, and when I called back 20 minutes later, he was suddenly tied up in a meeting. How convenient.

I believe I am being ignored. The situation is quite unambiguous. Full Flavour failed to provide services for which they accepted money. This was their error, not mine, and was not prompted by any abuse of services on my part. I am therefore entitled to a refund for services not provided.

So far Full Flavour has refused to even acknowledge their mistake, let alone address any request for compensation. Again, silence.

This is absolutely disgusting, and not at all how you should treat customers. During the time all this was going on, Jesse had the gall to post criticism on Geekzone of the support offered by another provider. I am also a customer of the provider in question, and I know for a fact they have far more respect for their customers and obligations than Full Flavour appears to. They do actually respond to e-mails.

So, come on Jesse. Stop ignoring the facts, admit you made a mistake, and refund the money paid for services YOU failed to provide.

Update 16/4/15: Despite stating in this thread that a refund would be forthcoming, no refund has been received, nor any payment details sought. E-mails continue to be ignored, and return calls never made.