FastHosts: How to annoy a customer in one easy step

Helping out a friend today, I decided to snag one of my programs to help cleanup his computer. Woops, FastHosts had other ideas. At first, I thought it was a problem with his connection, so decided to check it when I got back home.

Nothing - or rather, not what should be there. Wanting to know what happened, I checked my e-mail - nothing. Usually if FastHosts shut something down, they tell you about it first, so I checked the sites DNS and WhoIs records, but they were fine too. This was becoming curious.

I resided to calling my friend Andrew at Inspiratech (FastHosts reseller that I got the domain + hosting from), and he informed me that at around 11:00 this morning, FastHosts had shut down my domain due to an abuse report.

What Andrew hadn't been told, is that they'd also shut off not only FTP access to the sites, but e-mail access aswell, effectively crippling me from receiving e-mail. Nice one FastHosts.

But the plot thickens. Not only had they not contacted me to simply ask I remove the offending file from the server, but they'd indirectly stopped Andrew from informing me of this, and further, have annoyingly, redirected all of the sites - to sedoparking.com!!!



Nice one, disable a domain because of an abuse report, don't let the domain owner know - and then redirect all traffic to one of the worst pay per click piles of excrement I've had the displeasure of discovering!, just so you can make some extra cash from scamming users.

In short, the sites they have disabled are;

it-mate.co.uk
bughunter.it-mate.co.uk
clif-notes.it-mate.co.uk
comicfan2000.it-mate.co.uk
freeware.it-mate.co.uk
guestbook.it-mate.co.uk
hb.it-mate.co.uk
mj.it-mate.co.uk
multi-av.it-mate.co.uk
respect2glory.it-mate.co.uk
sandbox.it-mate.co.uk
support.it-mate.co.uk
surl.it-mate.co.uk
temp.it-mate.co.uk

Basically, everything except;

avant.it-mate.co.uk

Quite why they've left this one is a mystery, and to be frank, I couldn't really care. But an answer from FastHosts, along with their re-enabling the domains, would go a long way to restoring my faith in their being anywhere near competent. Especially considering this is not the first time they've done this to someone's domain. Previously, they shut down WebGrid, then re-enabled it, just to shut it down again without notice (and bear in mind - there was NOTHING THERE TO CAUSE IT TO BE SHUT DOWN!!!). They've also previously, shut down two other sub-domains I ran (though years ago now), apparently because they were too popular (or as they put it, using too much bandwidth (fine, let me know and I'll move the damn things some place else!!!)).

One has to wonder what kind of idiot is in charge of these kinds of things at FastHosts - they're in dire need of a staff transplant.