The Planet Not Honoring Request To Cancel Service

I recently switched webhosts from The Planet to iWeb -- not really because of the recent outages at The Planet but more because I was just looking for a better price/performance ratio. I thought other people should be warned about my experience, which was that it was not possible to get The Planet to honor my request to cancel service.

I filled out their online form to cancel service. They then sent me an automated email saying that I had to call a certain 800 number within 48 hours to confirm. When I called that number, I got a message saying that all their people were busy, and offering to let me leave a message and have them call me back. I tried four or five times over then next day and a half or so, leaving multiple messages, but I never got through, and they never returned my calls. I then opened an online chat session with one of their people. After going around in circles for a while, she told me that The Planet had a new policy, which was that confirmation was not required in order to cancel an account. She assured me that my account would be canceled within 48 hours of my original request, and that I would receive an email by then confirming the cancellation of the service.

At this point my monthly billing date was only one day away, and I wasn't very convinced that they actually would refrain from billing me. So I called my credit card company and changed my credit card number to make sure that it wouldn't be possible for The Planet to run the recurring charge. (Changing the number seems to be the thing to do in this situation, and is really not that difficult. You just have to switch any other recurring-charge accounts to a different credit card, and wait a week for the new version of the card whose number was changed.)

Well, sure enough, I got an email from The Planet saying that they'd tried to bill me, and the charge had failed.

I don't know if this is a systematic problem at The Planet. A couple of things may have contributed to the problem. One is that I was originally a customer of Rackshack, which was renamed to EV1 and later bought by The Planet. The Planet apparently has separate user databases for the two sets of customers, and this initially confused the person I talked with in the chat session, although she eventually assured me that it was ok. The other factor that may not be generally applicable is that this was in the time period right after the explosion at one of their data centers, so things were probably crazy there, and that may have contributed to their problem with processing the cancellation correctly.