ValueWeb Rant

I use ValueWeb as my web hosting company. Normally, I don’t have any problems with them. This week is different:

A few days ago, I went to my website like I do every day. I found that instead of my home page, I got a page that said my site was “temporarily unavailable”. That wasn’t a big deal. I figured that maybe they were doing upgrades or something. So, I check their status page. Well, they were actually doing maintenance that day, but it wasn’t on my server. So, I logged in to my account and found that my account was locked due to non-payment. So, I looked through my records and found that I did in fact pay them. Also, their page to pay invoices said I was current too.

At this point, I was pretty puzzled about what was going on, so I gave them a call. If I knew that I was going to be on for an hour, I would have called them after lunch. It turns out that they locked my account for spamming. What the heck! I don’t spam! Why was my account locked? Apparently, someone complained about my domain. I said “Okay, can I have a copy of their complaint?” Nope! They can’t give me the details of the complaint so I can’t do any research. What is up with that?

I was told that ValueWeb has basically a zero-tolerance policy with regards to spam. Well, that’s just fine. But I think that they should have at least let me defend myself. I can appreciate why they closed my site and cut my outbound e-mail, but did they have to cut off my inbound e-mail too? What really bugs me is that I lost all of the e-mail that was sent to me from the time they cut off my site to the time I got them to restore it. Okay, so I probably just missed the latest Dilbert comic, but that’s not the point!

Ah well, if you’re reading this, then my site is back to normal.