Stuck with Volusion? Here's One Way to Play the Game

If you're stuck with Volusion, as I am, you're very familiar with regular site outages. Volusion promises 99.9% uptime, which all Volusion customers know is a bowlful of Fecal Crunchies.

What can you do about it?  Follow the guidelines in the Volusion Terms & Conditions:

Volusion warrants that the network will be available 99.9% of the time in a given month. This service level warranty shall not apply to performance issues: (1) to the extent caused by factors outside of Volusion's reasonable control; (2) that resulted from any actions or inactions of Customer or any third parties not affiliated with Volusion, for example a DDOS attack on Customer's site or another customer's site hosted on the same server; (3) that resulted from Customer's equipment and/or third party equipment; (4) that resulted from software related issues; or (5) that are scheduled by Volusion for purposes of maintaining or updating the Web Site or the Software. The network availability measurement expressly excludes downtime caused by (1)-(5) above.

Subject to Section 17 of this Agreement, if you experience Network Downtime above and beyond the 99.9% availability, upon request Volusion will refund a customer 5% of the monthly fee for each 30 minutes of Downtime (up to and not to exceed 100% of customer's monthly fee). This is your sole and exclusive remedy for failure to meet the Service Level Warranty. "Network Downtime" exists when a particular customer is unable to transmit and receive data and Volusion records such failure in the Volusion trouble ticket system. Network Downtime is measured from the time the trouble ticket is opened by the customer to the time the server is once again able to transmit and receive data. If Customer fails to comply with this requirement, Customer forfeits its right to a receive service credit. 

In other words, bombard the hell out of Volusion's support ticket system IMMEDIATELY every time you notice a site outage. After doing so, you'll be able to file a refund request for each 30 minutes of downtime.

That's one way to combat Volusion's BOHICA bandwidth overage charges.