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Our startup website is down. Hosting provider suspended our account

4 points by ecarder ↗ HN
Our startup website is down. Hosting provider suspended our account. We live in 3d world country and we build 1st social networking website in our area, ectually in entire Central Asia.

We started to gain users, people rejoiced about our sucsess, one user invited his 250 friends to join to network. Our American hosting provider considered that invitation as complaned SPAM (that was not in english) and shot down our account.

We are lost, everyhting we were working for 3 years are down (40 websites we build and updated for our customers).

We begging to hosting provider please reacvitate our account, be mercy to us. We not spammer we are scuseful startupers, 1st in our area. don't kill us/pioneers!

friends what should we do?

16 comments

[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 36.8 ms ] thread
noodle
continue to talk to the host and if you have the money, consider talking to a lawyer.

never become threatening, but mention that you're going to be contacting a lawyer about this matter.

did you not have code and/or database backups? if you did, go get a new host. if you didn't, you should have made some. i feel your pain, but its a mistake to not back up stuff.

ecarder
The speed of internet is very low, that is hard (impossable) to upload all files (images) as a back up. We did MySQL backup. Our hosting provider are horrable with SPACE, price and speed, tech support. I better would not tell about it :)

we need to grow in that area much... USA is not cheapest and etc place to buy hositng.

mg1313
You need PR, you need the press to know about this abuse (if it's true).
ecarder
PR, most of our customers do not talk in egnlish. That was real challange
YuriNiyazov
I am curious - where are you and what is your website?
mg1313
If they are in a 3rd world country contating a lawyer could be pretty much useless. I bet they don't have enough money to pay a lawyer. I'd say take this story to the media (of course, if this is true and after you did everything to negotiate with your host).
ecarder
hard to believe but Hosting provider did not answered us for several days, customers gave us hard time... I post this message here and wrote to HP and they activated our account. IS that YC news or my letter or other mircale but we get back. Thanks you guys.Thanks to our hosting provider. Now we think how to escape this situation again... that is so simple to get there with social network people liked :)

thanks guys, thanks no pain no gain

Our life was over for 5 days, now we resurrected again... yeah

run4yourlives
one user invited his 250 friends to join to network.

Who are these people?

Back on topic, why don't you just move all your stuff to another account? Just load your backups and go nuts. You do have local backups, correct?

Given your target audience, I'm not sure why you're with an American provider. You should probably stick with someone more local.

donna
We no longer rely on managed shared virtual hosts as application servers. Consider:

Setting up your own server: - Pay for the Mac Mini + Time Capsule - Set up Amazon account with credit card - Sign up for AWS/S3 service, with auto-billing - Configured with Apache 2, MySQL 5, PHP 5 - Place behind your firewall on DSL connection, enabling TCP on port 80 - Set your domain's DNS records to point to Mini

Capabilities - Box handles 500-1,000 visitors per hour (no monthly cost) - Backup Drive automatically backs up all content hourly, saving older versions for disaster recovery - S3 stores all heavy content for distribution; handles HTTP serving of content to unlimited clients simultaneously at up to 500 KBytes/second (delivery of 100GB content costs less than $20/mo)

ecarder
Please send me a link where i can see what you talking about and maybe that is true to use what you talking about thanks!
ecarder
is that http://aws.amazon.com/s3/?
donna
yes
ecarder
Donna, we registered with amazon, but totally lost with all complicated system there. Where is admin panel, how to create Data Base, upload our site and files? where is FTP. if you could help me with advices or give right link to look that would be great. Thanks
ecarder
Donna, That is my email forisc(at)gmail.com thanks
lsc
this is another example of why you always need offsite backups (even if it's a server on your DSL line)

People make mistakes. web hosting providers are run by people. Data loss happens.

I go even further and say that you need to make sure that no single person can delete every copy of your essential data (unless that single person owns most of the company) - if nothing else, you should keep backups under the founder's bed.

known
What does the SLA say?