Do forgive me for sounding a tad curmudgeonly, but I am not hugely impressed with web hosting services which – without warning or explanation – remove your web site from their servers, lose the files in the process and then place you willy-nilly on a crippled ‘non production’ server so that you can limp along until they can kick you off properly.
Bad form.
So, a word of warning to those with weblogs which use any dynamic elements like PHP (such as WordPress, etc). Don’t be fooled by tempting pricing and huge bandwidth and storage offerings. The new killer on the block is server load – and if your site becomes popular enough to adversely impact the other sites sharing your box, you risk the same kind of treatment as this poor Ferret – even if you’re well within your bandwidth and storage limits.
Finding your site homeless and broken of an early morning is not a pleasant experience, and to this Ferret’s mind is tantamount to finding your clothes and belongings tossed out on the street by an unscrupulous landlord after returning from a long weekend away. Why, pray, are there no safeguards to protect Net tenants from this kind of rude and summary treatment?
Not to go on about it, but most civilised countries now provide citizens with some form of legal protection for tenants, so why not on the Internet? Why has no-one come up with a Net Tenants’ Charter administered by a Net Tenant’s Association? Which would guarantee that –
a) As long as a site owner has done nothing illegal or deliberately abusive, they will be protected from summary eviction and mistreatment by web host services?
b) In the event that a hosting service violated the Charter, they would be legally liable for a mandatory penalty not less than $100 per week of infringement?
Prospective customers could then choose whether to use a host who displayed the NTA Charter symbol (rather like ABTA?) or to take the risk and choose one not accredited.
It just seems fair to me. :-)
Update: Oh and just to keep you lovely Ferrety folk up to date, I’m afraid that all user registrations and comments from last week have disappeared, along with the nasty old hosting company. So please re-register and/or re-comment if you like. But only if you like. We wouldn’t, like, force you. Nope. Never.
I agree completely – plus damages should be added to compensate the regular readers who have been totally ignorant of cool new gadgets (well some) for a whole week. If only I could find a site selling suitable replacements for the marbles I lost I could tell you how much to sue for.
Long may your Ferret Ferret,??? Well you know what I mean.
Huw
You are so very kind, my dear sir! :-)
But we’re back, and we’re mad. And we’re not going to take it anymore. Er…maybe we’ll just have this nice cup of tea first though, eh?
I have just recently suffered a similar problem, having had my own website for over a year, I got a demand for renewel, which I have met (2 years of infact) yet, my website, and my email address (the only email i’ve had for the past 12 monthes) are now wiped off the web, I dont get it. I just had to make a fickle hotmail account and change all online accounts (ebay, banks etc) to the new email address. I’m not best impressed, the annoying thing being, they’ve already taken my money for the next 2 years.
Yes, my point exactly Luke. :-|
So who’s the new host? How are they so far?
Bunch of uber geeks going by the name of textdrive.com. Scarily efficient, super sharp about things like security and so far really on the ball. :-)
I’ll report more as we progress down the hallways of life. :-)
erh. why don’t you tell us who the OLD host was too :D
Oh yeah. :-) Lunarpages.com. But the reason that I didn’t really want to rant on about them is the fact that up until the moment when they acted so badly, they weren’t a bad host at all. Their tech support was actually rather good all round.
I suspect that there are many worse hosts, so my post was really to talk about the whole situation in general rather than pick on just one company.