One Danger of blogging
“update + whats been going on + why isnt any one around”
This was the subject line of an email I received recently. It was a rather long email attempting to explain why my then web hosting company had been offline, silent and un-contactable for the past 2 months. Yes two months.
Having accepted another annual hosting payment from me, and I imagine many others, the hosting company seemed to disappear from the face of the earth, well Australia anyway, with servers offline and helpdesk email and phones unattended. After two weeks of trying to speak with someone, anyone, I received an email from a third party support person who had permission to view helpdesk calls, but had no access to fix anything on the system. I was told that the owner hadn’t been heard from for at least a further two weeks and I was encouraged to check out this third part support persons own hosting company – sounded like a sales pitch. But at least he made the effort to let me know something.
So – I moved on. I called my bank and started the process of trying to redeem my money, I found another hosting company, who to date have been very good, and I began trying to restore data from old backups.
This whole situation got me thinking. One of the dangers of blogging and using a hosting company is that my data, public and private, is now sitting on a server hard drive somewhere. I have no idea whether the data is retrievable or not. I have no control over what happens to the hard drive it is stored on. What if the server is still working and sold onto another company? What if it is dismantled and sold of for parts? Some pimple faced teenager buys the hard now has my personal information!
I guess I’m not so much upset with the fact that this company went out of business – it happens. And I’m really not that upset that they took my money. What really upsets me is that they took my trust and threw it away. I trusted this company with my information and they really have not given me anything in return. One email of explanation in over three months. One email and then more silence.
So who is this hosting company that broke my trust, yes I am going to tell you – only because a warning needs to go out to other would-be customers, a warning that this company may not be a wise and trustworthy choice.
The infamous company – Host Web Live (Perth, Australia) - http://www.hostweblive.com.au/
I went through the same thing with the same company.
I do get the feeling it’s a one man band unfortunately. Who are you using for hosting now? Hope you were able to “break free” successfully! I (and it seems many others) still receive invoices after trying to leave!
yeh - still getting invoices and emails telling me that the system is back up and running. Ended up with dreamhost.com and haven’t had a problem… Bit of a shame really as I was really trying to support an aussie company.
Ahhhh, hostweblive hasnt gone out of business, (we’re moving servers amongsts countrys and re-starting our au network with interstate waix/pipe peering) i replaced some staff, i took ill required afew surgeons cuting me :/ and my daughter had some personal issues. So i consulted a third party support firm to handle our support and billing backend of operations. who then drained our costs upto an alltime high allowing unsecured clients to rack data bills of $1,000’s and also didnt reply to our clients support requests, following that we find out the third party company we were using was on its last legs they also are in the industry so as they started neglecting our clients in support they started taking sales, they even had the nerve to walk of with $5,000 and aprox $85,000 in damages including stopping our clients to access the dc’s we were using in australia via altering our access list/logs to the centers, we had to call on the federal police to get our assets/servers back of said theives and also had to deal with legal letters from our clients whom we retreived servers for ( the undisclosed firm has done this to 14 providers so class action is still ongoing 3yrs later), I can say any one who has paid for something and didnt receive ie: hosting email me and i will ensure your billing is honored and any other fee’s you have paid to get hosting elsewhere and you can be assured the new infrastructure we’re putting in place is entirely under our control right down to the bandwidth/power/racks etc etc, we do supply managers and our techs mobile numbers. Im sorry weve lost your trust, we would like to repair that if possible….lessons have been learnt….jail time is on the cards for the undisclosed firm’s con artist owner, Hostweblive and other providers who became victims have had the @###$@#&^$#@ served with court papers, weve had their merchant account shut down individual gone into hiding…now its time to rebuild.
we’re moving usa pop to new york peer1 dc, 2 x servers located in perth, 1 x server farm in adelaide, private 8 rack room in sydney, the usa bdr route we have is essentialy 40% peering traffic to au, which combined with our waix/pipex routes makes the re-vamped firm still able to provide low cost au hosting and tailored routing for our commercial clients. Were adopting a 1hr easy fix guarantee for our hosting clients, server clients 3hr response time, 6 hr resolution time, 12 hr dedicated server faults replaced gauranteed.
for now emails can be sent to uptime_d_services@hotmail.com, also our pabx system wont be active untill the new site is up running via a priority system if CS cant help you. You will be connected to our onsite/ofsite techs on duty and ofcourse management level if need be.
we do care, we do want to settle issues with clients affected…….but its been hard with starting our system from scrach, clients will need to email date money was paid and method, account.domain name/ ph number so we can get you re-entered into the system, we did have a strong history of never losing data and great services….so let it be known raid/NAS/remote ftp dumps are in use, we’re in bussiness
backup access is restricted to myself and 1 other individual our senior network engineer.
Like i said contact us