Domain/hosting transfer time

My website was put offline due to a misunderstanding where they tought I was doing fraud, after explaining the situation they said the site would be put back online after I delete the problematic data. I did this and for hours and hours have heard nothing back. I opened a new ticket which they promptly deleted, leaving my other ticket still opened and unreplied.

I can only assume they no longer want my business and am now in the process of moving the site to a host that cares about it's users.

My website is over90% of my income and they really really don't care, so I won't be doing business with DiscountASP anymore unless the issue is resolved very soon, but it's already been hours I feel they're ignoring me.

 

I don't think they're ignoring you...
The DASP crew really goes out of the way to help everyone.
Mind you I have no idea what is going on but if I had to guess...
They need to sort through whatever the problem was before acting accordingly.
Please understand these sort of things are really touchy nowadays, everyone has to be extra careful.
All the best,
Mark

 

If they're not ignoring me why are they deleting additional messages I ad while at the same time not replying to me in hours and hours? They were replying in 10-20 minutes at first.

Anyway I've already signed up with another hosting company and am just waiting to have it setup to transfer my site.

I really do think they are ignoring me, how hard would it be to at least tell me "it'll be a few more hours", that's ALL I'd want, but they chose to ignore me, and loose me forever as a customer.

I will also strongly consider suing them for the lost income they have caused me, this website is 90% of my income and it looks like it will be down for at least a few more days as I transfer to a host that cares.

DiscountASP - You've lost me thanks to your disgusting ways of dealing with customer emergencies.

 

Due to a very urgent issue in my account which has gotten no attention in hours, I'm on the verge of cancelling my DiscountASP hosting due to unacceptable response times regarding an urgent issue.

I would like to know how long will my site be down for if I do decide to transfer to a host which hopefully provides better support to it's users?

Thanks

 

Hi,
Sorry to see you are experiencing trouble.
Can I be of any help?
Salute,
Mark

 

Admin and to any others reading: This has indeed been resolved and I am happy to say I am staying with DiscountASP and cancelling the other host I signed up with.

As I had explained my FTP software, Internet Explorer, was in fact showing the problematic folder to be empty so I was sure the files were all gone. It is only when I installed SmartFTP and went to the same foldere that I saw 4 files remaining, why IE reported the folder as empty when it was not and SmartFTP worked fine is beyond me.

I truely appreciate that DiscountASP did for this issue and understand the great risk it posed to all of us.

Thanks again for the great service, I just would have liked to be kept up to date during the 24 hours I waited, not knowing if I was being ignored or if the issue was really being taken care of. A simple "It may take up to 24 hours to resolve" would have reassured me.

Sorry again for this issue, and as I promised it will not ever happen again.

 

Hello "aab1,"


There was no misunderstanding. I explained the situation to you in many, many emails, and I think we straightened this out yesterday with no hard feelings. So I understand that these posts were written while all this was going on and you were very frustrated. I think we're good now, yeah?


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But now a day after the fact, to give anyone else reading this a little insight into how we deal with certain issues, I have to start by telling you a little bit about the practice known as phishing. Phishing is when someone sets up a site with a phony PayPal login (or eBay, or - name any bank, you get the idea), then they send out spam with a PayPal return address, which you have probably seen many times:


"Please update your PayPal account information"


And that email contains a link that looks like it goes to PayPal, but it really goes to the newly set up scam site. Spam reader sees the "important" email from PayPal, clicks the link and doesn't notice that they are not at PayPal's site, because the phisher has put up an exact replica of PayPal's login page (yes, they could look at the address bar in the browser and see they are certainly not at PayPal, but a large number of less experienced users do not). Victim logs in, once they do that, scammer has their user/pass.


That's phishing in a nutshell.


All the companies that are frequent targets of phishing are very, very vigilant about such sites, and find them very quickly. They then report the phishing site, usually not to us, but to our upstream providers. The companies that supply our bandwidth. One of the companies that supplies us with bandwidth has a very strict policy regarding phishing. Fair enough. We don't want to host such sites. But here is the gist of the notice:


YOU HAVE ONE HOUR FROM RECEIPT OF THIS NOTICE TO REMOVE THE SITE OR WE WILL NULL ROUTE YOUR IPS!


If you don't know what "null route your IPs" means, it means they basically cut our network off from the internet. Completely. One hour from the notice.


So you can see that we do not have a lot of time to delve deeply into these complaints. We make a quick check of the URL - "Okay, yes, this is obviously phishing," and we yank the site.


So far so good. Except our friend "aab1" has a legitimate account with us. I can see from looking at it that it is not a phishing site. But it does have a phishing element -he does his business through eBay and the phishing-type pages were meant for some development purposes. But they still looked exactly like phishing pages, sowe still had to takehis site down. I emailed him and told him what was going on, and that we knew he wasn't a phisher, etc., and left FTP access open so he could remove the files. "aab1" emails back a few hours later saying, "Okay, done deal, all eBay pages are gone." So I re-enable the site, hit the reported URL, and the eBay login screen is still there.


So - the site is re-suspended and I email our friend again. I have no choice. Remember, leaving it up threatens to shut down our entire network. A few hours later "aab1" writes back, "Oh, sorry, FTP glitch, I missed some files that were still there." So we start the process over again.


Yes, "aab1's" site was down during this whole process, which took almost 24 hours. But unfortunately, wecannot threaten 31,000 sites to appease one person who doesn't seem to be complying (saying all eBay files were removed when they were not). From my perspective, as someone who deals with abuse and fraud every day, if someone tells me the files are gone and they are not, red flags go up and I tighten the screws, whether there is a legitimate reason for the files being there or not. I have to. It's self-preservation for the company.


So while I am sorry that "aab1's" site was out of commission for as long as it was, there's nothing that could be done about it. Well, actually, he could have deleted all the eBay files after the first warning. That would have shortened the process by 16 hours or so. I'm sorry he had trouble deleting the files, but I cannot apologize for doing what needs to be done to protect the company (and everyone reading this who has a site with us).


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And by the way, we never delete email messages sent to helpdesk. "aab1" sent multiple tickets that were merged into one thread so we could keep track of them. When we merge tickets, the old ticket dies, so it may appear to be deleted, but it's just part of the main thread.


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I don't mean to sound like a cold hearted bastard about this, but we have been null routed for this issue once in the past, a couple years ago, and there is no way I'm going through that again.

mjp
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