TheChrisD - Rant Central

The nightmare is over…

When I first signed up with Dreamhost, after being told about them by Adam and how you could get $110.10 off the cost of a hosting package, I didn’t see any issues popping up. 2 months later, I try to be nice for my former Clan and host stuff for them to download, since no-one else had web space, and they weren’t willing to use FileFront, or RapidShare or some crap site like that.

10 days later, I’m browsing the web normally, when my Windows Live Mail pops up informing me it was unable to connect to my SMTP server to get my e-mail. Odd, I thought - so I went to check it out. Open up the Web Panel to find almost everything disabled and a not very obvious message saying “This account has been disabled”. I’m thinking WTF, but not too worried since it’s probably just some hiccup from the billing disaster a few days previously. Support ticket sent, shouldn’t be too long now.

The response I get however, is where the nightmare began:

Subject: Disablement…

Hello,
Your account has been permanently disabled for violations of our Terms of
Service and copyright law. Engaging in the unlawful, unauthorized
distribution of copyrighted material is strictly prohibited.
http://stuff.thechrisd.com/MOHAA/
(pirated copy of Medal of Honor game, with serial)
Jeff,

W…T…F…
I decide to do something nice and share my web space with people so that we can get a game going, through quite legitimate reasons I should say - the no-CD exe for Medal of Honor can be used for legitimate reasons - I may even use it myself if I keep forgetting to bring my discs with me when I want to play somewhere else. And the serial only needed to be used to install the game, which in itself doesn’t need to be installed, as you can just manually put it in place and run it!

However, it was not the end of the nightmare. I initiated transfer of my domain away from them since I was not keeping it in a place where I had no direct access to it. So I ask them, and am given the authorization code - yet it takes them 3 days and 2 more tickets to get them to remove the proxy settings on the WHOIS information, so that I can actually receive the admin e-mail to go through with the transfer! Now this ticket I send requesting it be changed, yes I may be a little angry, but I’m expressing my displeasure in a mannerly way:

Subject: THECHRISD.COM

I am seriously getting annoyed now. I have already requested several times over for you to change the administrative e-mail address for THECHRISD.COM to ***************** so I can receive the transfer codes necessary to transfer my domain away.
This is terrible service, which I could very easily have done myself had you not completely removed my access to the domain controls from my Web Panel.

Gets responded to with this load of shit:

Subject: Re: THECHRISD.COM

Hello,

You are not entitled to be “annoyed” - you engaged in illegal activity in
conjunction with our services and, quite honestly, should consider
yourself fortunate that we consider your issue to be a priority at all.

Believe it or not, we have other issues to deal with - some involving
individuals who did not engage in illegal copyright infringement using
our services - and they, too, need to be addressed. We will look into
your problem and find a resolution when we are able to do so.

Jeff,

Now that REALLY pissed me off. They were my domain registrar, so they had a responsibility to do what I asked them to do with regards to my domain. Being my web host and my domain registrar are two different things Jeff! You may have fucked me over on the web host part, but that gives you no right to fuck me over on the registrar bit! And this was only the 18th of January…

Eventually however, a nice support guy named Karl started to respond to my tickets. He was extremely helpful with everything, and although he was unable to provide backups of my important data (i.e. blog theme!), he was still polite about it and actually treated me as a proper customer, rather than a criminal.

So, domain now with a new registrar, it took about 16 hours before the DNS properly resolved - thus, last night I noticed my site was back up and running
Now I’m in the phase of rebuilding, since my last backup was about 2 months ago (my scheduled backup never happened as I was disabled…) - the theme still needs to be worked on to get it fully back to the way it was, and the gallery need to be completely re-done since the database I was able to pull from them (up-to-date!) is fucked…

In short, never sign up with NightmareHost. In no way will you need 600GB of space and 6TB of bandwidth a month. Heck my new package on my new host is the smallest and cheapest one they offer and I still get 250GB bandwidth…
That, and Windows Live Admin Center kicks ass, as you can get free Hotmail e-mail accounts for your custom domain - which will be really handy so that my e-mail doesn’t stop even though my site does. But that’s for another post