Agreed!
Why can’t credit card companies learn something from PayPal? How hard would it be fore credit card companies to have a “do not allow future charges from this entity” in the customer’s credit card control portal? Seems that would alleviate a lot of this. This is essential what canceling a PayPal subscription does in the PayPal interface.
Regarding the OP’s issue – I would encourage you to make sure you are following the the hosting company’s cancellation procedure exactly. Often times, simply writing to the hosting company and saying you don’t want the account any longer isn’t really good enough to cancel the account. Playing the hosting company’s advocate here, they probably have a cancellation procedure and it’s in their best interest to only honor cancellations that follow that procedure.
Playing the consumer’s advocate though… I can understand that some companies like to make cancellation difficult (every try to cancel DirecTV?). So while I do encourage making sure you to follow a company’s cancellation procedure – being able to log into your bank or credit card and explicitly say “I don’t want to be charged by this company any longer” would offer the consumer protection against difficult companies that simply don’t want to cancel accounts. This is essentially what cancelling a PayPal subscription via PayPal would be doing.
It really grinds my gears when we get chargeback requests from customers, who never submitted a cancellation of their account and they want to argue “I quit using the account but you kept charging me” … Well, we don’t know that you quit using your account unless you tell us. That should automatically invalidate a chargeback request. But it’s often hard to prove that something never happened. I would love for credit card companies to adopt a “do not allow future charges from this entity” flagging system for their customers and this would stop a ton of chargebacks. The credit card company will be able to see that the consumer never flagged the hosting company for “do not allow future charges from this entity” so what right do they have to run a chargeback?
But the credit card industry is like most other industries. If they didn’t think of it – then it’s a bad idea.