I returned home from my Thanksgiving holiday to find three messages in my junk mail folder, all of which appeared to be phishing attempts. Each of them is from a bogus e-mail address [email protected]. Each of them refers to a support request I never submitted, and has a phony "Incident ID" (which is different in each e-mail). Each of them demands I do something (what is not exactly clear) with my site within 24 hours - on the Thanksgiving holiday weekend! And the only "signature" on any of the e-mails is from John S.S. (which is not suitable for legal service or suit, which is where this is ultimately going).
My site contents have not changed in the entire time I've had the site (other than updating software that clients download), my account is up to date, my site contents are all legal, moral, and clean, and every file on the site is linked to a legitimate web page - certainly each site has been robot'ed by Google and appears in their search engine. I am nowhere near the file storage space I purchased with the web hosting service.
Despite all of this, my site was shut down without any legitimate notice, without any specifics to any false allegations of misconduct, and without recourse - the only statement in any of the e-mail is that GoDaddy.com has determined that my site is a "file repository". I have three domain names, all registered with GoDaddy.com, pointing at various pages - two have been "suspended", one has not. The only "files reposited" on the service are the graphics, video, text, and download files necessary to support the sites! There is no FTP upload supported, no Bit-torrent files, no spam, no music or commercial video files, nothing related to sex... Again, the same content has been on my sites since I first purchased the webhosting service from GoDaddy.com.
When I called a phone number buried in one of the e-mail messages (tiny print, light-gray color, at the bottom), I spoke to someone who gave his name only as Chris K. He told me I had to respond to the e-mail and wait patiently for some anonymous person to explain to me the hoops I would have to jump through to get my service restored... Service that has already been paid for well in advance. When I asked what was meant by "file repository" and for a list of files on the site that were supposedly in violation of this concept (after eight months of dormancy), he told me he couldn't help me.
So, my business is being held hostage to some recently-promoted minimum-wage penile-brained OCD powerfreak hiding in the shadows, preparatory to what I understand will be an extortion attempt of some kind (this is the pattern of other similar complaints against GoDaddy.com across the Internet, including a complaint on this site).
I talked to a friend of mine at iPowerWeb, and he tells me the following: Sites like GoDaddy.com don't actually have the 300 gigabytes they sell you with the hosting service - they are banking on the fact that the average customer uses nowhere near that much and essentially overbook their capacity by factors as high as ten to one (that is, they sell 300 GB, but only have 30GB average in the "bank" for each customer. However, with the advent of YouTube, music-sharing, and larger-sized application downloads, the average sizes are increasing dramatically. These sites then try to gain back storage space (which they actually have to lease from third parties) by eliminating certain subscribers based on the following criteria:
1. They are lower-tier price customers (i.E., shared hosting on UNIX boxes);
2. They have not purchased add-on subscription services (web page design, search engine placement, report services);
3. They consume higher-than-average actual file space;
4. Most importantly, they have turned OFF the annual automatic-renewal charge to their credit cards.
The assumption is that they can harass these customers with automated e-mails and service interruptions until they simply choose another provider, foregoing the remaining balance of service owed them by GoDaddy.com.
Unfortunately, I meet all of these criteria (except that I did register my domains with GoDaddy, but apparently that doesn't meet the test of monthly-fee addons GoDaddy deeply desires).
The damage to my business and other interests caused by this outage completely wipes out any advantage there ever was to discount hosting by a susbstandard provider like GoDaddy.com.
Scott
Sugar Land, Texas
U.S.A.
0 comments