Siteocity can kiss my ass!
The last few weeks have been very frustrating computer wise…
Firstly, a few weeks ago, I discovered all my sites (then hosted by a provider called Siteocity) appeared to be offline with a notice saying they’d been suspended and I needed to contact billing.
At first I assumed I had accidentally missed the renewal date but it turned out that instead, somebody had been using a script on my sites, to run some malicious code to try and steal customer details from some American bank!!!
After initially convincing Siteocity that I had no idea this was happening they agreed to put back up my site on the basis that I removed the offending security loophole. As I had no idea what this loophole was they advised me it was a “Hacked Forum” - now a forum to me is a discussion board… so I said the only forum I had upon my webspace was one on LibNET but I agreed, if that was what was causing the problem, I was happy for them to remove it.
Anyway… 24 hours later my site is back up and online… all good I think! I wander through the site, checking everything is working as it should and I notice that the polls script on the front page of LibNET appears to have been broken. Now I simply assumed this was as a result of Siteocity stuffing it up by having my site offline and then restoring it… it never occurred to me that this was the “Hacked Forum” to which they had previously referred.
So, I fix the poll script and all looks good! Great, back to normal….
24 hours later… Site down again!
Now what? I go back to Siteocity live support chat and I am informed that my site has been taken down again for the same reason as before and that they are under strict instruction never to restore it again!
After numerous emails, some of which were very detailed and long, I believe I had explained the situation from my viewpoint and the fact that I am not psychic and do not know that their comment of a “Hacked Forum” was actually to be read as “Poll Script”
But it was a total waste of my time. They had made their decision to remove the site and would not even give me a refund for the period of credit I had with them.
Luckily, after several days of pestering them I eventually managed to get a backup of the whole site and have now finally managed to relocate it all to a server at Bluehost… well, except LibNET, which is currently still down and I need to have a closer look at before I put it back up in its current form as I don’t want a repeat performance.
Anyway, you can probably imagine how pissed I was to have all this stuffing around! Not what I needed to be doing although I guess on the good side it has put me back in the mood to do some webpage stuff so I’ll probably finally get around to updating my pages again now.
And Siteocity, you SUCK! So, if anybody reads this who is looking for a web host, let this be a warning to you… at Siteocity you are considered guilty without trial, you will waste your energy if you try to write them long emails, they will just ignore most of what you say and send extremely rude emails to you… half their support staff seem to be linguistically challenged when it comes to communicating in English and if you ever want a refund, not a chance! DO NOT USE THEM! I will make it my quest now to bad mouth them all around the net!
Oh, and btw, I’m not saying Bluehost are necessarily the best web host on the net, but it sure opened my eyes as to what a much better deal you can get than with Siteocity.
So, that’s my server woes of the last few weeks… oh, and don’t even get me started about setting up my father-in-law’s new computer that didn’t like his old Alcatel modem! That’s been another saga within itself…
But anyway, it’s all good now! I’m cool!