[ecchi]

A thought has crossed my mind. I don't know much about NV, but two things I do know are:

When things go wrong people will hang on forever hoping something will go right. I used to sell sites with hosting packages. I had plenty of people who bought a site, signed up to pay the hosting each month via PayPal, then did bugger all, expecting Google to make them rich. They ended up with less than ten hits a month, some got no traffic at all - ever, but they continued to pay the hosting every month. Over ten years later I still have clients paying for hosting on sites that they have never made a single cent out of. I am still making money out of them because they either cannot live with admitting failure or cannot be arsed to cancel the small monthly payment they pay via PayPal.

I also know (from bitter experience) that when things go wrong with your billing agent it is soul destroying. It makes you want to give up the business, stop working and go and live the rest of your life in a cave.

Perhaps the NV guy got that way when they had billing problems and decided to retire. Knowing how people behave (as mentioned in my first point), perhaps he decided he could finance his retirement simply by giving up NV but not telling anyone. Those that eventually got the message and closed down would have closed down anyway if he had announced his closure, so he looses nothing. But even if you post on every board that he is a crook, many webmasters will still hang on (look how many idiots still use GoDaddy even though hardly a month goes by without someone posting somewhere about their dishonest practises), so he will always have enough sites for a few members to pay each month. And if he stops paying the webmasters, that should be more than enough to live on!

Because, seriously, is anyone going to actually bother suing him?