Reseller Hosting - What can go wrong
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My own experience with reseller hosting!
Welcome to the NIGHTMARE!
So where did this nightmare begin? To be honest it really started some ten months before writing this post. You see, i was looking to start an online business and obviously i was going to need somewhere to store my website. Without taking notice of several things that i had been told by people in the know, i looked around for a really cheap hosting package thinking that what i saved on hosting, would give me more money to invest in the other areas of the business that i had decided to start out with…
I did not really know what reseller hosting was and i admit that i should have looked into it more deeply. But even if i had, i could not honestly say that i would have done things any different as inexperience lets us all down. So i signed up for the hosting that i had chosen and paid the fee of £10 ($19.95) for the year and was up and running with my new venture in a couple of weeks. Everything was great for about nine and a half months, without one problem arising. Then a little over a week before writing this, something happened!..
I tried to visit my CPanel area of my hosting and could not login, i kept getting the login applet popping up over and over again with no indication as to what was wrong. I then tried to access my website through my browser and was instantly thrown to a page that told me that my site was suspended and to please get in touch with my hosting provider. This is where i began to start wondering if i had made the right decision, of starting my own business venture…
The misery continues
I spent the next couple of days sending emails to my hosting provider, along with going to the website and trying to contact him from the email address on there. After not receiving any replies, i visited a forum that i was a member of and where i met my hosting provider. I pm’ed a message to him with no reply. I then left a post in the forum and received several replies telling me that the person that i had got my hosting from, had not been seen or heard from in the forum for a few months. His last post had been in July and it was now the middle of October…Apparently he had an accident shortly before posting his last post and had decided to go back to working on a building site and since then had not been heard from. The funny thing is that i was more concerned about his health than the mess i was in with my site and i posted a comment asking if someone heard from him to let me know that he was alright…
When i later checked into the forum the next day, i asked for help and advice on getting to my data as otherwise, everything that i had done in the past months would be lost and i really did not think that i would have carried on if i had to start over. Then i got a reply from someone that had helped me several times in the past, whilst i have been building my business. Enter Dan Thompson!..
Someone comes to my rescue
Dan told me that the person that was hosting my site, was using what is know has a reseller account with a company called Hostgator. Dan advised me to contact them and to ask what the problem was. I immediately visited the hostgator site and noticed that they had a live chat link, that would allow me to converse via text with someone on a send and receive basis. I logged on to it and began talking to someone and explaining my predicament. The person that i was talking to advised me to contact their sales department by sending an email to open a support ticket…
I sent the email explaining again the predicament that i found myself in and after waiting until later that evening, i received a reply from hostgator stating that because the person that was reselling me web space. had not paid his monthly account bill, the whole of his reseller account was suspended until he made payment. I got back in touch with Dan Thompson and told him what had happened. He then told me to write a polite email to hostgator asking if they would allow me access to the site and control panel for a few hours, so that i may back up all of my data…
I then contacted hostgator again with the most polite email that i could muster, only to be told that they would not be able to allow this as my hosting space was in effect the property of the reseller. I had to ponder this reply, because surely if the reseller had defaulted on his payment, the account and whatever space is being used reverts back to the original provider of the service ie, hostgator. Part of their reply also inferred that they would have no way of knowing the resellers account details. This really baffled me, because i know that i hold account details of the customers in my business and have access to those details for contacting them etc.
I got back in touch with hostgator and explained that seeing that my provider was a reseller of their product, this would mean that they are privy to his details, but are not privy to my detail as he is in effect my hosting provider. This means that they can use his details to access his account and if i supply my details of username and password, they should be able to allow access to my data. Not the case, i was told, we cannot access his account data…
You pay the price for stupidity
I then asked if there was some other way that i could gain access to my data. Yes i was told, you can pay for another hosting account from us and we will then be able to transfer your existing data to this new account and then you will be able to download or move your data. I thought hang on a minute, you just told me in a previous email that you cannot access the hosting and data of the reseller? Being already totally pissed off with several days of to and throwing of emails to hostgator. I decided to opt for this method of getting my data, even though i hated the fact that i was having to pay out more money to get what in effect is my property…
I asked hostgator if that was all i needed to do and was told that i just pay the hosting fee of $8.95, give my username and password of my old site along with the domain name and that is it. The first thing that i noticed after i selected the monthly hosting called the hatchling account, was that i was going to be charged another $5 for setting it up. I had not been told this when i asked, but i really did need my data and if you are held more or less to ransom and you’re data is important to you, what can you do. Nothing and they know it!..
Things did not go smooth even after paying up for my data. Several more emails and more days of stress, because the new new username and passwords that were given to me did not work, so i still could not get at my data. Some more emails and more waiting more or less a day each time for a reply and bingo. We have lift off. I felt like shouting from the rooftops “I HAVE ACCESS TO MY DATA, YIPEEEE”…
Things can always get better
What i needed now was some new hosting, (i know what you are thinking. He has just purchased a new hosting account with hostgator?). If you have seen my picture on some of the places that i am a member of on the web. I may look stupid but not that stupid. How can i trust a company that held my data to ransom? What i needed was some hosting that i could rely on with a service that i could trust and to have my best interest as priority. It was then that i remembered Dan Thompson, who had bent over backwards to help me before and during this major problem. I also remembered that i had heard that he and a partner were to setup a hosting service May i say at this point, just so that it is clear to those people that read this article, that at no time during the help that i received from Dan Thompson did he mention about his hosting service and this tells me that the guy is totally trustworthy…
I found the link that i had saved to Dan Thompson’s hosting service that i had saved some months ago in my favorites and used it to visit the site. One of the first things that i noticed was that it said on the site, “Free Set-up. No Hidden Fees and Free Transfer From Existing Host“. I then looked at the packages and found that i could save about £70 (about $150) if i took out a 24 month hosting package, so instead of having to pay around £150 (about $300) , i could pay £82 (about $166). Now i consider that a really great saving and still know that i will get 100% satisfaction…
All i had to do now was fill in my details of my old site, username, and password, so that i can have the data moved from hostgator to d9hosting. Dan had this done in a matter of a few hours and he even sorted out my databases that were needed to be able to use my blog and ew-portal scripts on my site. My data is now all up and running and i would not have got it like that, if Dan Thompson had not come to my rescue…
Conclusion
So even though this was really down to me not being savvy enough, to get the right kind of hosting in the first place and thinking that i was saving myself a fortune by not following other peoples advice that had experience in this sort of thing. It still makes me angry to think that i was held to ransom before i was able to access my data on the hostgator hosting service. My advice to you is therefore, not to think in terms of what you are saving when signing up to any sort of hosting service, but to think carefully of the upset that you may have to go through if you make the mistake that i did. Remember that you may not have a friend like Dan Thompson to pull you out of the proverbial Shiite…
Before i finish, i would like to say that if only one person reads this and by doing so, saves themselves the grief that can happen to them, then my going through this experience was well worth the agony…
Stay calm, be polite and if that fails, then get a good friend like Dan on your side…
Author
Vince Andrews
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