Hacks & Spammers Y2K Notice .NET? PetWhere Thanks! Hosting Problem

Last month; we lost our web pages due to a snafu with our last hosting provider, "FrontPages Web Hosting Network".  

This problem came out of nowhere, and ended a 2+ year business relationship.  This affected several websites, www.jassing.com, www.sanjuan28.org, www.pnwford.com, www.foxshare.net, www.eig-inc.com - all web sites & domains are hosted & supported by jAssing.com.  (All of these domains were hosted on jassing.com as (for example, jassing.com/sanjuan28/ and had the url www.sanjuan28.org redirected to www.jassing.com/sanjuan28/ automatically to make them appear as if they had their own separate IP.)

Many of you have asked what happened, so here's what happened -- as far as I can tell.

  1. On 8 Aug 2002 in the morning, I complained that a web page had "reverted" to an older version.
  2. At 12:21pm, we were notified that "redirecting a sub web to a top level domain" was "against the policy" and were given 24 hours to stop it.
  3. At 12:25pm I stopped redirecting, and notified them, and ask them to point me where in the "terms and conditions" it said I couldn't do that.
  4. At 1:13pm I noticed I could no longer access web pages.
  5. At 1:18pm I was notified that they changed their minds, had terminated my account.  They informed me that I needed to pay them a "$500 site clean up fee" -- unfortunately; I am on a dialup; so I did most of the editing of web pages "live" (this has now changed) so I had to pay them their "clean up fee" to get my data back -- they gave me 2 business days to get them the money; if money was not received "on time" they were going to delete all my data.

I tried to contact them by email and phone. They refused to talk to me.  "Contact our legal department by email only" -- which I did; and never received any contact back.  I retained a lawyer.

My lawyer tried to contact them, apparently; they have no "legal department" and are a wife & husband operation with a friend kicked in there... That's the "company".  The only place in their terms and conditions we could find mention of $500 "site clean up fee" was if I had any porn.

My guess is that they just needed some quick cash.

They took their time getting me my CD with data; in the meantime, Adolph of NoQuestionHosting came forward, and we worked out a deal for web space for the domains, and we're now back in action.

Legal action is in the works to sue for down time & get my $500 back.  They continue to charge my credit card the hosting fee, so now it's credit card fraud on top of it all.  If you want to help contribute to the legal defense fund -- feel free!

Luckily; mail is handled internally, so email (and mail lists) were not affected; just the web pages.

That's about it...

(c)