EzzHosting is a web hosting corporation that is legitimately registered with the Secretary of State in FL. That much is true. They have several branch companies which are 'not' corporations including EzzMedia.com and EzzMerchant.com.
My chief point of contact with these organizations was a gentleman by the name of Michael Cammarata, who claimed to be Director of EzzMedia.
EzzMedia was a web client for my company, NexusCore Ltd. I had spoken with Mr. Cammarata by phone on numerous occasions about the possibility of NexusCore redesigning the EzzMedia website so that it included FLASH and to make it more attractive to Mr. Cammarata's target consumers.
A new week dawned and EzzHosting's CEO, Mike's dad, was supposedly dealing with NBC (yes the television people NBC) for an exclusive media distribution deal (not sure if this is accurate or not. I have seen nothing about this deal in ezzhosting financial statements filed with the SEC for fiscal year 2000.)
Mike needed the EzzMedia site to include FLASH immediately. He said that the cost should not exceed a thousand dollars, and I told him that was not a problem, we would ensure the cost of the FLASH integration would be $800 or less, and that NexusCore could also provide EzzMedia with a more contemporary logo to represent its business. Mike agreed.
NexusCore turned around the FLASH and logo in 96 hours so that Mike could meet his deadline (before the NBC deal concluded.) I typed the invoice myself and sent it to Mike via e-mail as he had requested. The invoice was about $775 for the actual Flash work
$25 per hour FLASH x 31 hours = $775
$80 for the logo (which we needed to draft three times before he approved a design he liked)
and $40 for voiceover recordings
After about five days of no contact from Mike, I called EzzHosting at the # on their website but got a voicebox. Mike did not return my call for 48 hours.
One week following contract completion now, Mike said that the ezzhosting billing department needed me to fill out one of 'their' invoices. I asked Mike why he didn't tell me that in the first place and he said it's a new thing with his company. So I gave him the benefit of the doubt, had him e-mail me the new invoice, I filled it out exactly as he told me to, and sent it back.
No contact for several days. At this point I knew that NexusCore would likely be shafted by EzzHosting so I had a member of our accounts receivable department call EzzHosting. Mike immediately called me after speaking with my rep and demanded to know why I 'sent a creditor after him.'
I told Mike that he failed to meet a contractual obligation and that payment was needed as per our agreement. He said that he would investigate to find out why billing was taking so long to file and disburse the NexusCore contractor check, and apologized.
I waited three days, nothing.
I had accounts receivable call him again, though this time they were unable to reach him at all. I called him as well and left a voice box message (probably the sixth in a two week span now), and got a voicemail back from him while I was sleeping stating that he was working on it and that I may need to fill out another invoice.
After about three and a half weeks of this pish-posh, I gave up on Mike and looked up ezzhosting's public records kept on file at the Florida Secretary of State office.in this file was a phone number to Ezzhosting's legal counsel (or at least, the lawyer that filed Ezzhosting's articles of incorporation, may not be a legal counsel at all.)
I called and got an answering machine. (9am). I called back at noon and got an answering machine. I called back at 3pm and got an answering machine, so I left a message for the lawyer. No response for 2 days. (For a legit law office, that's a lot of potential clients to lose if no one is there to answer the phone and inquiries with just names and numbers are not returned).
I call back and leave another message (still no secretary or live agent to receive the call at the lawyer's office). No response.
Due to the fact that this sale was transacted over the internet, NexusCore's legal recourses were extremely limited. The transaction occurred over state lines, so it would be considered a federal case if a case was ever filed. The attorney general in Florida told me this and that his hands were tied, but he did let me file an official complaint which would remain public record there.
Finally, a little over a month after this nonsense began, I told Mike in writing (rather tactlessly this time I might add) that his organization was among the most disreputable and dishonest I had ever had the misfortune to do business with.
For some reason, Mike actually took this complaint seriously and had his mom (Ezzhosting CFO) write a check to NexusCore for $300 and he priority mailed it.
However, the remaining $600 was never paid. Mike has however demanded that NexusCore modify the ezzmedia site and transfer some key Flash files to his company's webmaster in the interim. We of course did neither.
Because we design a website specifically for our client companys' consumers, the ezzhosting site design was useless, it could neither be recycled nor redrawn and resold because it was designed to target ezzhosting's customer demographic, no one else's. We were left $600 in the hole with no way to recover the damages.
NexusCore is a business, and until this encounter, we operated on the honor system that if we designed a website for a company, the company would pay us upon project completion.
Unfortunately, this situation alerted us to the high risk involved with interstate e-commerce service provision, and so we now have a policy set forth that a good portion of fees must be billed up front.
It's a decision we did not come to lightly, nor a decision we wanted to make, but just one bad apple can spoil the barrel, and even with hundreds of ethical firms out there, just this one has forced us to this extreme measure to preserve our financial security.
For all of you out there. If Ezzhosting acted like this in a business transaction, IMAGINE how it will treat you as a hosting customer.
We strongly recommend you fully investigate ezzhosting and talk with a live representative there before paying for any services they provide.
By law we can not say anything that will deface or defame the character of ezzhosting corporation, but the above is a matter of public record now, filed with the attorney general in Florida, even though the AG will do nothing about it.
You should also know that this company claims (on its website) that it is a member of the BBB and Verisign, but when I checked with both of these organizations, neither shows any indication of ezzhosting in its database, except in the case of the BBB, I filed a complaint in their central FL chapter, that's there.
Check out ezzhosting.com You will find no privacy statement, no snail mail address, no phone number. Just e-mails now. Fortunately I have that physical information from earlier this year, or NexusCore would truly have been powerless to collect anything.
Thank you for your listening:
Elye C. Sackmary
President
NexusCore Ltd.
Www.nexuscore.com
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