My Shitty Experience With Proxy51
- Thread starter mituozo
- Start date
This is simply not true. I wanted to cancel and like you couldn't work out how the fuck to do so, so I simply emailed support and got a pretty prompt and polite reply saying thank you for using them and the subscription was cancelled.
Same experience for me.
A couple days ago I had a billing related issue. I submitted a support ticket and I got a response within 6 hours.
It seems like your beef should be with Paypal for having a clunky system for pre-approved payments and not with Proxy51.
from one of my Fav. Armin songs of all time (2:41)
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6Gt2D5mbrU"]Armin van Buuren feat. Jennifer Rene - Fine Without You (Official Music Video) - YouTube[/ame]
I've got 15/100 that are dead too but wtf, it's $35/month, you get what you pay for. If gay webmasters would quit using them on scrapebox with way too high of a connectionsroxy ratio, they'd work a lot better. Silly fucks should be scraping with public, posting with private/shared and we could all have nicer things.
It's not like there's any lack of publicly indexed proxy lists out there...
Yeah, I'm not debating the quality of the proxies. I wasn't expecting the world for $35/mo, it's the problems I've had with trying to cancel and the fact all my proxies got wiped out the second I cancelled when I paid for them for the month ahead that's got my back up. That's not cool.
I emailed support 14 hours ago and have no reply as of yet. I know someone else who sent an email, had no reply for 5 days, had no proxies up after 5 days, and after talking to the guy on Skype, still nothing happened, he ended up cancelling. It's not my place to say who it is though.
Whilst the Paypal interface is clunky and poor, I've never had a problem like this cancelling a sub/pre-approval via Paypal. The billing company should ensure they have the same details on both their invoices and their pre-approved payments. (Like you do Cardine, with my monthly payments for Word AI, which have the same company listed on the invoice as on the pre-approval.. If I ever wanted to cancel, I could do it swiftly in minutes). Using a different company name on each one is straight up deceitful to be honest, and I've no idea why Paypal lets it happen.
Took me ages to cancel the subscription using PayPal. I had to use PayPal staff support, and went through 4 of them until they found the recurring subscription, and I only have like 2 subscriptions. Strange thing is that it's not even on the subscription/recurring payment but hidden somewhere else. Then when I cancelled, all the proxy went dead for me even when I had 3 weeks that I already paid left.
I used USA Proxies - Top quality shared and exclusive private US proxies before. They're a fair bit more expensive, and private rather than shared, but the owner was cool, happily gave a refund on something that'd already been paid for (although I wouldn't have held it against him if he didn't)
/start rant
Speaking as a merchant who formally used paypal for recurring subscriptions, it's a fucking nightmare for reasons that would take up a page of posting.
But lots of merchants use paypal as there are a lot of tools and apps out that make it easy to set up. But what a bitch to run especially after a couple years.
We dropped it after six months and now bury the option to subscribe via paypal on our website (because some people just want to paypal, dammit).
The fact that it's nearly impossible sometimes for non-tech people ON THEIR END to cancel subscriptions is beyond stupid. Like I want to take your fucking money when you don't want it taken?
/end rant
Speaking as a merchant who formally used paypal for recurring subscriptions, it's a fucking nightmare for reasons that would take up a page of posting.
But lots of merchants use paypal as there are a lot of tools and apps out that make it easy to set up. But what a bitch to run especially after a couple years.
We dropped it after six months and now bury the option to subscribe via paypal on our website (because some people just want to paypal, dammit).
The fact that it's nearly impossible sometimes for non-tech people ON THEIR END to cancel subscriptions is beyond stupid. Like I want to take your fucking money when you don't want it taken?
/end rant
cheers Joe. People always need proxies
i like to use some of the many VPNs out there like overplay.net
it's a bit of work to setup openvpn on linux, setting up an extra interface and making PHP use that interface but you're given a lot of IPs for $10 a month.
i like to use some of the many VPNs out there like overplay.net
it's a bit of work to setup openvpn on linux, setting up an extra interface and making PHP use that interface but you're given a lot of IPs for $10 a month.
Hi all,
Owner here. Let me address a few of these claims.
1. Recurring billing issues. We use PayPal preapproved payments for recurring billing. Yes, it's a shitty fucking system. But there's nothing we can do about that. It was our best option when we set up the billing system. That said, when you signup, you go to a page on PayPal where you explicitly say "I APPROVE PLUTUS NETWORKS LLC TO TAKE MONEY OUT OF MY ACCOUNT FOR THE NEXT YEAR" or something to that effect. When you click ok, YOU ARE AUTHORIZING US TO TAKE MONEY FROM YOU ON A MONTHLY BASIS. This does not constitute unauthorized payments. Of course, sometimes you have trouble canceling, and you get billed. I'm not a fucking dick. When this happens, I refund you no questions asked. I have never denied anybody a refund, ever, for any reason whatsoever.
2. "Proxies not working." We (meaning myself and a sysadmin on payroll -- this is one aspect of the business I take very very seriously) have multiple monitoring tools in place to make sure your proxies are working 24/7. We check that you can connect to them and that they are reasonably fast. If you are unable to connect to them, that is a problem and you should open a support ticket so we can figure out why. But if you are getting Google 503 errors or Twitter is blocking your IPs, there is nothing we can do. Google chooses what IPs they block. Also, this summer they began blocking entire ranges of 255 IPs rather than just the single offending IP. That's why we switched to offering only shared proxies. Because even if you had private proxies, someone else with a nearby IP address could get you banned. This is still true... so there's really no point in paying extra for "private" proxies elsewhere.
3. "proxies not getting delivered for 5 days after signing up." I don't know where you heard this one from, because it has literally never happened. In fact it's basically impossible. When we receive your payment, a script allocates your proxies. If we do not receive your payment, or if your payment is declined, we do not allocate your proxies. Sometimes we get tickets from people like WHERE ARE MY PROXIES BRO? when their payment was declined AND they got an email about their payment being declined. I don't know what else I can do here other than offer remedial literacy classes.
4. "no reply from support unless you add the guy on Skype" This is also patently false. In almost 18 months of operating, I have never ignored a support ticket (note a support ticket means an EMAIL TO SUPPORT, or a SUPPORT TICKET, not a PM on blackhatworld).
5. @Kaedus The "truly unlimited bandwidth" is actually false advertising. Bro... we've talked about this at length before. You can use as much bandwidth as you like. In fact, you were hardly using any. The problem is velocity. You were sending like 50 requests per second to the servers. SquidProxy (as in the software) simply cannot handle that kind of load. Was I supposed to let you hog all the server resources while the 300+ other paying clients couldn't even use the servers? I'm sorry that I canceled you immediately, but every second that I didn't cancel you was a second that other customers could not use their proxies. Also, I refunded your money. Whenever I terminate someone's account, I always refund their last payment, even if it was 29 days ago.
6. Proxies disappearing when you cancel. This is a problem, and this goes back to our shitty billing system. But whenever it happens (usually rare, since most cancellation requests go through me), I always reactivate the proxies immediately and often give an extra week of time on the subscription for the trouble.
7. Slow support. Right now, I am the only support operator. Unfortunately, it has to be this way right now, once again because of our shitty billing system having bad permissions control. We are working on a new billing system that should be ready in 1-2 months, at which point I will install a team of support operators. Despite this, I make a very concerted effort to reply to every ticket within 12 hours. Does it always happen? Unfortunately no. But most of the time it does. This past week has been slow because I have midterms. Sorry.
In short... yes, we have a shitty billing system. But when it fucks people, we credit their account. And we are in the process of building a new system, but it takes time. You all should know, as most of our customers do, that I view client satisfaction with the utmost importance. If you ever have a problem, open a support ticket (just click the giant SUPPORT button on the right of the page) and I'll take good care of you.
Thanks,
Miles
Owner here. Let me address a few of these claims.
1. Recurring billing issues. We use PayPal preapproved payments for recurring billing. Yes, it's a shitty fucking system. But there's nothing we can do about that. It was our best option when we set up the billing system. That said, when you signup, you go to a page on PayPal where you explicitly say "I APPROVE PLUTUS NETWORKS LLC TO TAKE MONEY OUT OF MY ACCOUNT FOR THE NEXT YEAR" or something to that effect. When you click ok, YOU ARE AUTHORIZING US TO TAKE MONEY FROM YOU ON A MONTHLY BASIS. This does not constitute unauthorized payments. Of course, sometimes you have trouble canceling, and you get billed. I'm not a fucking dick. When this happens, I refund you no questions asked. I have never denied anybody a refund, ever, for any reason whatsoever.
2. "Proxies not working." We (meaning myself and a sysadmin on payroll -- this is one aspect of the business I take very very seriously) have multiple monitoring tools in place to make sure your proxies are working 24/7. We check that you can connect to them and that they are reasonably fast. If you are unable to connect to them, that is a problem and you should open a support ticket so we can figure out why. But if you are getting Google 503 errors or Twitter is blocking your IPs, there is nothing we can do. Google chooses what IPs they block. Also, this summer they began blocking entire ranges of 255 IPs rather than just the single offending IP. That's why we switched to offering only shared proxies. Because even if you had private proxies, someone else with a nearby IP address could get you banned. This is still true... so there's really no point in paying extra for "private" proxies elsewhere.
3. "proxies not getting delivered for 5 days after signing up." I don't know where you heard this one from, because it has literally never happened. In fact it's basically impossible. When we receive your payment, a script allocates your proxies. If we do not receive your payment, or if your payment is declined, we do not allocate your proxies. Sometimes we get tickets from people like WHERE ARE MY PROXIES BRO? when their payment was declined AND they got an email about their payment being declined. I don't know what else I can do here other than offer remedial literacy classes.
4. "no reply from support unless you add the guy on Skype" This is also patently false. In almost 18 months of operating, I have never ignored a support ticket (note a support ticket means an EMAIL TO SUPPORT, or a SUPPORT TICKET, not a PM on blackhatworld).
5. @Kaedus The "truly unlimited bandwidth" is actually false advertising. Bro... we've talked about this at length before. You can use as much bandwidth as you like. In fact, you were hardly using any. The problem is velocity. You were sending like 50 requests per second to the servers. SquidProxy (as in the software) simply cannot handle that kind of load. Was I supposed to let you hog all the server resources while the 300+ other paying clients couldn't even use the servers? I'm sorry that I canceled you immediately, but every second that I didn't cancel you was a second that other customers could not use their proxies. Also, I refunded your money. Whenever I terminate someone's account, I always refund their last payment, even if it was 29 days ago.
6. Proxies disappearing when you cancel. This is a problem, and this goes back to our shitty billing system. But whenever it happens (usually rare, since most cancellation requests go through me), I always reactivate the proxies immediately and often give an extra week of time on the subscription for the trouble.
7. Slow support. Right now, I am the only support operator. Unfortunately, it has to be this way right now, once again because of our shitty billing system having bad permissions control. We are working on a new billing system that should be ready in 1-2 months, at which point I will install a team of support operators. Despite this, I make a very concerted effort to reply to every ticket within 12 hours. Does it always happen? Unfortunately no. But most of the time it does. This past week has been slow because I have midterms. Sorry.
In short... yes, we have a shitty billing system. But when it fucks people, we credit their account. And we are in the process of building a new system, but it takes time. You all should know, as most of our customers do, that I view client satisfaction with the utmost importance. If you ever have a problem, open a support ticket (just click the giant SUPPORT button on the right of the page) and I'll take good care of you.
Thanks,
Miles
Cheers for the response, hopefully the improved billing system means that a lot of these problems never happen in the future.
With regards to the proxies themselves, I had no issues with them not working, they just weren't as fast as other providers I tested (but they are also much more expensive, so I'm not complaining about this - it's just they didn't suit my needs). The proxy quality isn't the reason I made this thread - just the shitty experience with trying to cancel, and then all my proxies disappearing the second I did.
The reason so many people have problems with cancellations is because your company names don't match Miles:
"I APPROVE PLUTUS NETWORKS LLC TO TAKE MONEY OUT OF MY ACCOUNT FOR THE NEXT YEAR"
Isn't how it's showing up. On the pre-approved list it shows as Charge something or other, then when I look in my individual transactions I see Plutus Networks PLC. That makes it very hard to find the pre-approved payment and cancel it. Perhaps you have multiple names setup within the account or something and that's confusing Paypal? I dunno.
That makes sense. The issue is that we use www.cheddargetter.com for billing (so does wordAI, though alex executes it better than I do), along with their hosted payment pages, which are under the "chargevault" URL. So it goes proxy51 -> chargevault -> paypal/"plutus networks" -> plutus networks in your paypal preapproved payments. I realize that this is awful. I'll see what I can do in PayPal to make this a little bit better.
The new billing system will use actual PayPal subscriptions. Unfortunately, there's no recurring payments solution I found that can do this, so I need to hire someone to code it from scratch. It'll take a while but it's my #1 priority to get settled over the next week or two.
The new billing system will use actual PayPal subscriptions. Unfortunately, there's no recurring payments solution I found that can do this, so I need to hire someone to code it from scratch. It'll take a while but it's my #1 priority to get settled over the next week or two.
We had to pay a software shop $10K plus to integrate our recurring billing system with Beanstream (TD bank merchant). But it was worth it to get off Paypal hell.
It is a wonder to me that in 2013 there aren't any good off-the-shelf recurring billing systems out there (excluding the few that want to fuck you with 6%+ transactions fees).
Yeah my pre-approved payment said it was with Chargevault.
Subscription and Recurring Billing - Zen Simplicity - Recurly
Worth taking a look at, would save on development big time.
No Paypal support. That's unfortunately a dealbreaker for most internet marketing products.
This is a very good option if you can get approved for referential transactions (which is a requirement to use Recurly with Paypal).
Although I can't say this for sure, I do not think that Proxy51 would get accepted by Paypal for referential transactions.
Woah I just got approved for referential transactions.
Be right back, taking over the world.