Apr 03 2009
Excess 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.
