Criticism of DreamHost Continued

Part 1: Criticism to DreamHost.

On the night of June 1, 2007, my site was completed suspended. I could not access any of my pages or edit or upload, and the only site visisble was in the index page.

If you went to any of my other pages, it would say the page was not found on the server.

Here's what happened.

My site was originally hosted by Vibenet. Vibenet had some downtime temporarily, and since I was paying a monthly package, my admin transferred my entire site account files to a sub-account of his. That was to DreamHost. Well, his site was suspended, and since my site was at that time, his sub-account, mine too was suspended.

[June 02 2007 Saturday 08:37:00 AM] <NightWolf> Hello,
[June 02 2007 Saturday 08:37:01 AM] <NightWolf> Your account has been permanently disabled for violations of our Terms of
[June 02 2007 Saturday 08:37:01 AM] <NightWolf> Service. The unauthorized distribution, acquisition or storage of
[June 02 2007 Saturday 08:37:01 AM] <NightWolf> copyrighted material (ie. on http://www.kaotix-crew.net/forums/) is
[June 02 2007 Saturday 08:37:01 AM] <NightWolf> strictly prohibited.
[June 02 2007 Saturday 08:37:01 AM] <NightWolf> Jeff,

DreamHost did not send me an e-mail. I sent them an e-mail. It reads:

> Hello, my account was recently disabled, at almost 24 hours ago.
> 
> I only knew I was hosted by some company called Vibe-net, where the control
> panel was cpanel, and when it died, my admin transferred my account to the
> control panel panelhost. I paid the company 5 GBP, which comes to around a
> little over $10 U.S. dollars.
> 
> Well, it turns out my admin was just a customer at your company, and, due to
> some conflict in his forums, his account was suspended, which affected mine.
> While he said he will refund me, I didn't know he was paying you. Since you
> have my entire site, I decided to open a new account with you, doing the
> 2-year plan.
> 
> Anyways, I failed at registering my own account with you since my account
> name, NealIRC, and domain, obviously are already taken, by me (so the error
> message suggested I contact this customer service). Well, I was hoping if I
> start a new account with you, with a 2-year plan or the like, you will
> transfer to me my entire site back. At this point, if you don't back it up to
> me, I'm too disappointed or stressed to 'start my entire site' over again, so
> I would just resign from the account until I feel like starting over again in
> the future. Otherwise, I would just continue hosting my site indepdently with
> you, since I don't host anything illegal and etc..
> 
> Hope you can help.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> -Neal Conroy.
> 

That e-mail was to the sales-team. I made the mistake and e-mailed the wrong department.

My reply from the sales department was..

Sat 6/02/07 5:15 PM

Hello Neal,

Unfortunately, in this case, the person that you had your account setup
through had their account disabled for violating our Terms of Service.
This is important because you'd have to get in touch with that person to
retrieve the backups of your site. However, we aren't allowing them to
have access to their backups, so I believe there isn't much that can be
done.

I'm extremely sorry for the inconvenience that this poses. I would still
get in touch with the individual you had hosting your site though. Having
them contact the Abuse/Security department may yield positive results.

Let me know if you need help with anything else!

We actually went back and forth 5 times, before I e-mailed my original message to the abuse department.

After I e-mailed the abuse department, I did not get a message that night. Neither did next morning. The next morning's afternoon, an incident happened in IRC channels of which I was not in, and I also was not aware of that incident at the time. My reply (from someone else) was.

Sun 6/03/07 1:23 PM

Unfortunately we won't be able to provide any backups for the account in
question due to your colleague, "Ice_Dragon", threatening to launch a
DDoS attack against our servers in an IRC channel, and seemingly trying
to do so.

You can thank Mr. Ice_Dragon for the data being purged as a result.

Well, we all know it wasn't Ice_Dragon who made the threats, it was dshocker, the most powerful name on the Internet. ;)

This is what I replied to them.

> Okay, I think several assumptions were being made.
> 
> I didn't know exactly what a colleague is, so I looked it up on 
> Dictionary.com.
> 
> "An associate."
>
> This is probably from an assumption that I am affiliated with the crew. 
> However, I don't actually know Ice_Dragon. How I got started with Vibenet is 
> very simple, at late December, I got a global newflash on an IRC network 
> about quality web hosting, which led to a channel. I used the channel only 
> to get help from setting up my site.
> 
> In any event, from being in the channel, it wasn't Ice_Dragon who made 
> threats, it was by a dshocker. Since dshocker is connected from a vhost, 
> there isn't a way for me to identify his IP address or anything. On the 
> other hand, I don't see how this applies to me. I made my request last 
> night, and it seems the events happened today (which led me to assume that 
> you waited a day to get back to me about an event that happened hours after 
> my request). I don't know what faults I played at this point that got me 
> into this...
> 
> After having announced what you replied to me in a channel, I was then told 
> it wasn't Ice_Dragon who made any threats, and that it was dshocker. I'm 
> sorry about what happened, but it seems like you and them are playing a game 
> of continuing revenge, i.e., one harsh things leads to another, so as the 
> way as it seems to be going now, I seem unfortunate to have ever started 
> hosting with them.
> 
> -Neal.

And this was my reply.

Sun 6/03/07 3:49 PM

We have a blanket policy of not providing backups in cases of Terms of
Service violations -- specifically incidents as blatant as this.  The
DDoS simply didn't help the case any.

In any case, we would not be able to provide data to anyone but the
account owner.	They will need to contact us to resolve this issue.  I
believe the DreamHost representative who was in #dreamhost during the
aforementioned conversation has instructed the account owner to write
abuse@dreamhost.com, and this will be referred to the head of our Abuse
Department tomorrow.  Again, only emails from the account owner will
receive a response.

I replied something but did not save sent messages yet. I only got a paragraph of my reply back:

> And since my login and password doesn't match that of kAoTiX, I kind of  
> thought I'm a bit independent of him, until I found out I was just a  
> sub-account of his. Is that all I am? Heh.

The initial person replied:

Mon 6/04/07 2:35 PM

Unfortunately, that does seem to be the case. From what I can tell, the
owner of the account (who engaged in illegal activities aimed toward us
and others) at some point offered you hosting. That said, I'm sorry to
say that if you have concerns about the content of the account you will
need to address it to its original owner - even if he weren't involved in
attempting to cause problems we would be contractually unable to provide
access to content to anyone but the account owner.

Anyways, the problem isn't so much they took my site down and refuse to gave it back. It's that I offered to sign up as an entirely different customer to them (and register with a different name since NealIRC is already taken), in exchange that, they would transfer my site back, which they refused. Or in other words, they lost a potential customer.

My reply:

> I think my problem is is I want to open my own account with you guys, and  
> that NealIRC is obviously taken. If I picked a different login name, could  
> you transfer my files to that account once I open it?

While this is irrelevant to page, another reply from another e-mail I sent was:

Mon 6/04/07 8:02 PM

We will be unable to host you due to your association with a previously
disabled account. Bye bye.

How I would have reacted to this situation:

I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt (as opposed to the disadvantage of the doubt), so I wouldn't try to find a way to keep it at a disadvantage of the situation. The person said "we're not contractually allowed" meaning, their own contract, which is bound by their rules. Heh.

O well.

Well, DreamHost never gave my my site back. The crew at Vibenet were back up, they got a new server, so my site was retransmitted to their servers some weeks later. A lot of the files I had were saved, but some pages had to be done all over again, so that explains why several stuff on this site was deleted.

----------

Part 2: Criticism to Unknown.

Another story:

My site was hosted by a company that I don't remember, and unfortunately, this down time was more permanent.

From:  
Sent: Tue 10/16/07 1:51 PM 

As you might have noticed, your site hasn't been online for quite some time now. We have experienced a major problem at our data center, where our server was stolen or otherwise removed by a technician. The main person I deal with has been trying to get in contact with him to sort things out but has so far been unsuccessful. I currently don't know when a new server will be setup for me, but I do know that when it is, all the content from the old server will unfortunately be lost. 
I cant apologize enough for this, as its not the first time this sort of thing has happened to us and you.

I hope you can accept my apology and remain patient while we try and rectify the problem and resume normal order to our hosting. 

If you have any further queries, please don't hesitate to e-mail me back as this is my personal mail address and currently the only one I am using.