Citizen Power

Usually I write about energy, power, or climate change, or politics. Today’s topic is about a different kind of power — too much power in the hands of one company to destroy most of a person’s web presence.

This is not my only blog — I have several websites,  and a forum,  and three art/photo galleries, and two podcasts I host on one server hosting account with this one company.   I’ve accumulated these sites  over the last 5 years or so, like a lot of people have.   That means one company, my current host, has a lot of power over the existence of my websites.

Today, they abused that power.  Big time.  This account is with a company I will not name because now I’m afraid they’ll sue me if I reveal who they are, but it rhymes with Blue Toast.  So this company, which I will call Blue Toast, today pulled down all of my websites. Without warning!    If you were to go to them today you would have seen a blank screen with “Account Suspended” in giant letters.  All my sites were gone - vanished.  I have been a good paying customers of theirs for almost five years and today, with no notice of any kind, they simply suspended all my websites.    They notified me of this by an email that said basically — “Your accounts are suspended.  Call customer service.”

So I called them in a serious panic.   I found out that a long time ago, over a year ago, I made two folders with “backup” in the title in this account, and that was a violation of their “terms of service”.   Strictly forbidden.  I guess I shouldn’t have done this, but they should have checked with me first to see what kind of folders these actually were.   The customer service rep. told me “we are not a backup service!”  OK, fine, I said, but let’s be reasonable–  I’ve been a good customer and this is what you do to good customers?  A simple, harmless mistake that you call a terms of service violation that deserved a warning — not immediate suspension of my account which resulted in all my sites down and inaccessible!    I was mad, as you can probably imagine.

(And who reads every single word of one of those agreements?)

Then Mr. Customer Service explained how,  in their experience, warnings don’t work, so they resort to this extreme measure and just suspend everything so that you call them right away.  That’s really manipulative, and I don’t appreciate being treated like an irresponsible kid either, especially when their services aren’t that cheap!

Now imagine if I ran an online business (I sort of do — I have my personal website art gallery online with them)  and suddenly all my website business was suspended.  I would have been even more angry with them if I had a busy web commerce site.   They advertise themselves as being friendly to that type of website too.  Hah!

This is way too much power for one company to exert over their paying customers.  The end result?  I’ll probably be looking for another hosting company for my websites when this one is up for renewal this year.  It will be a lot of work and pain and trouble to switch at this point, though.  Unfortunately, I no longer feel that my websites have any security. They can be pulled and suspended at a moment’s notice, all for something this minor,  that deserved a 24-hour warning or something along those lines.  But to suspend everything!  I was afraid that my account had been hacked, in fact, or hit with a major virus.

One of the folders contained 7 GB of graphics and photos that may have been linked to on my active sites. I don’t know for sure, because I didn’t feel like I had the luxury of time to even check or copy this folder to my external harddrive.  I felt like I had to hurry up and delete this folder, which I did, or all my sites would stay down all day, and maybe into tomorrow.    So poof, it’s gone.

Well, now all my sites are back up, but I no longer feel safe with this company.  And they will never get a recommendation from me again.  In fact, if you see ads for web hosting by “Blue Toast” don’t be tempted. They have way too much power over your websites and they aren’t afraid to aggressively use it, even for minor infractions.   So much for a friendly relationship with my website hosting service.

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