When a previous client, Steve Irsfeld of Irsfeld Pharmacy, hired me to refresh his pharmacy’s website, little did I know I was about to attend a masterclass in how good businesses get trapped by predatory web services.
Steve had trusted me before.
We’d worked together in the optimization of his online course platform, Healthy Profits for Pharmacies, and when he and Marian, his head of marketing, needed a website refresh for Irsfeld Pharmacy, he knew who to call.
That trust meant something to me. Which is why what I discovered during this project made me genuinely angry.
We began the website optimization as most projects do: triage the existing digital inventory, complete a website audit, and determine if the platforms and software being used were the best for their business, or if others could be better suited.
And so it began… a treasure hunt leading me through a spider web of exploitation.
Here’s what I first found out: they were paying one Hibu, a digital marketing platform that promotes its services as an all-in-one solution for local businesses, $235 a month for web services, and had a separate FatCow account where, as Steve put it, “the emails live.”
They wanted to consolidate and modernize. Simple enough. We decided to build a fresh new site on SiteGround; faster, more secure, and significantly cheaper.
I built them a beautiful new website. Everything was ready to launch.
And then we tried to point their domain to the new hosting.
That’s when everything unraveled.
Nobody Knew Who Owned the Domain
To swap the nameserver and point the domain to the new website, we needed access to the platform where the domain was registered.
Except we couldn’t access it because no one knew where it was.
Steve thought he owned it.
The registrar had no record of him.
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) complaints went nowhere.
What should have been a simple DNS change turned into a six-hour digital forensics investigation.
And during that investigation, I discovered something that stopped me cold: FatCow wasn’t just hosting their email. They were charging for SSL certificates, domain privacy protection, site backups, security services, and add-ons that duplicated what Hibu was already providing. Many of these services were completely unnecessary. Others were grossly overpriced.
This wasn’t an oversight. This was a system designed to exploit the fact that nobody was looking.
The Financial Reality
Here’s what they were actually paying:
FatCow:
Three email accounts: $161.52/year ($53.84 each – for 50GB storage!)
SSL certificate: $112.35/year
Site backups: $99.99 for 3 years
SiteLock security: $377.64 for 3 years
SubmitNet Basic Submission: $18.99/year (SEO/directory submission)
The FatCow hosting plan: $824.56 for 3 years
FatCow total: ~$726/year
Hibu:
Web hosting
Basic security
Marketing/SEO services*
Hibu total = $235/month × 12 = $2,820/year
Total: $3,546 per year. For duplicate services. From two companies.
Both included “SEO” and “marketing,” which, in practice, meant listing the site on Google.
Hibu’s version included “analytics”, which were essentially a watered-down Google Analytics that, when Irsfeld Pharmacy tried to leave Hibu, they couldn’t access anymore. The content wasn’t easily transferable either.
Total hijacking.
We recommended SiteGround as a complete replacement. The cost? $350 a year.
Let that land for a moment: they were paying over $3,500 a year for web services that a single $350 hosting account could handle.
The Historical Damage
As I dug deeper into Steve’s FatCow payment history, the scope of the exploitation became clear.
Over the years, Steve had paid FatCow $6,983.48 for services that should have cost a fraction of that amount.
The most painful charges:
$372.09 for SSL certificates – something SiteGround includes for free
$869.95 for “Exchange Basic” email over five payments
$303.31 for basic email storage across 12 payments
$373.68 for SiteLock security, duplicating what Hibu already provided
$113.94 for “SubmitNet Basic Submission” – an $18.99/year directory service
The pattern was clear: take basic web services that should cost $20-$50 a year → charge $100- $400 for the same thing → bundle them with confusing names → lock customers into multi-year contracts → count on the fact that nobody will audit it.
The Hostage Situation
When we tried to get prorated refunds for the duplicate and unnecessary services, FatCow’s response was swift and final: “We don’t issue prorated refunds for any cancellations.”
Steve and Marian were trapped. Looking at their active contracts:
Site Backups and Restore: Locked until September 2027
The FatCow Plan: Locked until September 2027
SiteLock Essentials: Locked until September 2027
That’s over $800 locked up until 2027 for services they don’t need, can’t use, and can’t get refunded.
Meanwhile, the beautiful new website I’d built sat unused on SiteGround because we still couldn’t access their domain.
The Real Problem Underneath All of This
Steve and Marian aren’t unusual. They’re typical.
Most small business owners have a tech stack they’ve never fully mapped – a collection of tools, platforms, hosting accounts, and subscriptions that accumulated over years, managed by different people, paid for on different cards, renewed automatically without review.
That invisibility isn’t accidental on the vendor side. It’s the business model.
When you don’t know what you own, someone else profits from not telling you.
The red flags were all there; they just didn’t have a map to read them from, nor, at times, the full tech understanding to know when the “jargon” being used was a deliberate attempt to confuse them into thinking they didn’t know enough about something, and therefore, trusted the predatory situation.
Red Flags Worth Knowing:
Pricing:
- Monthly hosting costs over $50 for a basic business website
- Separate charges for SSL certificates – these should be included
- Email accounts over $10-15 per month each
- “Security services” costing hundreds per year
- Multiple bills for what should be bundled services
Contracts:
- Multi-year commitments for basic hosting
- No prorated refund policies
- Inability to easily export your website or email
- Automatic renewals for services you don’t remember purchasing
Control:
- No direct access to your domain registrar account
- Your web company owns your domain “for convenience“
- No annual statements or clear service breakdowns
The Fresh Take
This story isn’t really about FatCow or Hibu. It’s about what happens when a business operates without a clear picture of its own digital foundation.
The services that trapped Steve and Marian didn’t appear overnight. They accumulated quietly, over the years, in the gaps between what he thought he owned and what he actually did.
An annual tech stack audit wouldn’t have prevented every problem. But it would have caught most of them before they compounded into nearly $7,000 in unnecessary charges.
If you can’t name every tool, platform, and service your business runs on, and tell me who controls it and what you’re paying for it, you have a gap worth closing.
Start there. The Tech Stack Inventory Kit will walk you through it. It won’t cost you anything but an email to send it to, and it will help you get an important first step completed.
And if this story felt a little too familiar, the Website Assessment at YourFreshTake.com is where we review your entire digital ecosystem together.
This is Part 1 of a three-part series on how Irsfeld Pharmacy’s digital world was quietly dismantled and rebuilt. Explore Part 2: Digital Real Estate Hostage: When You Don’t Actually Own Your Domain →