The Energon Pub

[Me, Grimlock!]

I don't think I've ever been this pissed before. Maybe at the Brick, but Hostmonster just gave me what has got to be the most BS a company has tried to sell me and still want me to remain a customer.

Here's the history:

In a fanfic group, I created a site a few years ago (2000). I didn't do so much the writing, but the webmastering and all that entails. Everything has been fine since I did my own hosting on my own server. Never a problem. But when the server died and the Internet situation changed, we had to find external hosting. This was 2006 or 2007. Anyway, we found an outfit called Hostmonster and went with them and it was okay for a little bit. Not great, but okay.

Suddenly a couple months ago, our account was suspended. We didn't hear anything from them about why, and so I sent their customer service an e-mail address. Nothing. No response. A few days later I sent another and referenced the last time. Again nothing. I finally sent a third and still nothing.

So I called. Apparently the site was suspended because a fishing (or phishing?) site hacked in and used our space to do their business. Okay, I went in and deleted those files that didn't belong to us. The guy on the other end was supposed to e-mail a checklist to me and to another person of things we are to do to make sure the problem doesn't happen again. Okay, so we wait... and wait... and wait.... No checklist.

Finally I tried to log in and found that the data was deleted. I called them up, furious. They told me they can't restore the data and the guy on the other end gave me some huge BS about how they've been responding to our e=mails and sent this checklist on two occassions (when they first suspended the site and when I called). Apparently their whole song and dance was that they did everything they were supposed to do and they're the perfect company.

I have no blocks on Hostmonster e-mail and check my spam folder in case of mistakes. Two e-mail addresses (one from Yahoo and one from Gmail) were supposed to get their checklist but we haven't heard from them. We've basically had to chase this company to wring any information out. Furthermore the person who opened the account with them wanted to switch the contact info to miy e-mail address, so I switched it, both online and on the phone. But they have no record of my e-mail address. They've never heard of it! They also apparently have transcripts of having responded to us, but I don't see how that's possible since I never got anything! Neither has the other guy!

How a phishing site got on, I don't know. We have downloading functions on the site, but it only accepts TXT (which it converts to HTML), JPEG, and GIF extensions, and it's behind a password-protected area. But the Hostmonster guy said that their server wasn't hacked; our site was. Huh? Not really possible since it doesn't accept PHP files. (If any computer guru knows if it's still possible to hack a site like this, let me know. Once we find new hosting, I'll have to take measures.) I self-hsoted the site for 6 years and never had someone hack into the server or the site.

Bottom line is stay far, far away from Hostmonster. I hope I'm not actually setting them up for more business by posting this rant, but I'm absolutely furious with them. I've never been cheated so much. I guess I should count myself lucky that we only lost $20 U.S. (or whatever the remainder of the term was) but I more feel kicked around than pissed off about the money. The silver lining is I made a backup of the data before they went and decided it would be funny to delete it.

Still totally blew my top at them and said there is no way we'd want to use their services again.