Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.
By Max Bell on
A while back, I purchased a shared hosting package from a "friend" of a friend. About a week ago, I discovered that my sites had gone off-line, and I've gone through a series of excuses from my own friends (who have working sites hosted by same).
Suffice to say, in this same time, I have lost access not only to my own sites, but had my account deleted from their support system as well.
What I want to know is, do I have any recourse? I don't care about anything so much as the fact that I was ripped off, but then there are all the other people who will likely encounter the same problem. Seems like there ought to be some means of warning other people that this problem exists.
Comments
Don't waste your time
If you've not lost any important data and still have access to your domain name and can change NameServers, I'd call you lucky!
Just take it as a lesson learnt and go on... do some homework, for exaple, at WebHostingTalk.com there are a lot of people willing to share their *real* experience of hosting companies and you'll immediately spot scammers and the good guys. Also, maybe you could think to share *your* experience there as well?
Sorry to say, that's the way life goes - sometimes
Yeah, you're probably right. :(
There's some serious irony in that the only thing I'm out is the hosting fee; the only thing I had there, personally, was a sandbox installation and an email address. The site actually belonged to one of the owner's friends -- I just ran it for him.
Anyone else in my position could as easily have lost everything, down to their domain name (already had that happen, once). That's also the sticking point, however; in this instance, many of the other people likely to host with the service in question are also mostly first-time users who won't expect to find that they've been ripped off by somebody they'd otherwise consider "one of them".
This will definately be posted to WHT -- as well as anywhere else I can think of. In all, I can't help but feel bad about doing anything like this in the first place, I just don't see much of an alternative.
Don't throw good money after bad money......
Just move on and find another host, and get over it. I guess it has already costed you more time than setting up with a new host.
To lodge complaints against businesses try the BBB, and to get the word out try something like yourhostsucks.com if it still exists, or set up your own rant site. As for your "friends" .....
In general, the less said..the better.
Shared hosting with bluehost has been good up to now. (google them or any other one for that matter).
You can also do a search on this site for webhosting.
Good Luck.
Done and done.
Worth noting: yourhostsucks.com is still in operation. I've since posted to WHT.
Finding a new host is not an issue; that I am more than happy to do. I have no intention whatsoever of having any further dealings with devilhosting.net/mainchoiceserver.com.
On the flip side, I also have no trouble imagining that I'm the only person who got hosed, and more likely, that there are more than a few first time web site owners who simply went to work on their site lately and discovered that it wasn't there, and that their accounts had been deleted from the support site as well.
In other words, these people have some bad karma coming, and I don't mind the extra hassle of ensuring that it doesn't have any trouble finding them. ;)