Westminster College Blog has a new home

Hello everyone, for those of you who are the site's reoccurring visitors, you may have noticed that the site has been down for some time, you may have also noticed a complete aesthetic revamp as well. Well that is precisely what this post is all about, a little about the scamming nature of certain web hosts, a little about blog migration, and a whole lot of venting on these issues.

Over the last few days, Westminster College Blog was completely down and the reason for that is simple, the host I was using was a scammer. I've read of these types of hosts who take your money and a few months down the road, they run with your money. I trusted this guy because he was located in the United State, while the typical web scams and hosting scams occur over-seas; little did I know who I was dealing with.

Basically I got a great deal on eBay on hosting, this was the full Monte, fully featured WHM package which gave me everything and more, everything was working fine and I was very much satisfied with the service I was receiving. From time to time for short periods of time the site would go down but it would be back up and usually faster than ever, so I assumed upgrades were taking place. If you've read my past post entitled "Westminster College is back in business!" where I talk about moving to the new host and how great it is and also mention that the host is lightning fast and is connected to the NYSE backbone. All this is true for the primary host and although it was a dedicated server, the hosting was still shared and so I would see the ups and downs of that, which by the way still dilutes the idea of unlimited storage and bandwidth but that's beside the point.

So this is what happened, I was being charged a reoccurring monthly fee for the unlimited use of the server, the payments would be automatically drafted out of my checking account on a monthly basis through PayPal, a few months after signing up for the service, and coincidently around the same time when eBay's refund guarantee expired, the host stopped returning emails, answering support tickets and later canceled my reoccurring payment from PayPal, I continued to receive uninterrupted service and figured he needed to change something so a new contract would be sent to me to restart the payment cycle. This never happened, one morning I work up to the site being completely inaccessible, I logged in to FTP and that was down too, so I quickly checked the addresses of the other sites I have hosted there, some are mine, others are for clients, and those too were down, all FTP accounts were down as well. Forums were down, galleries were down, basically everything was dead, this was not the same as the occasional down-time I would sometimes experience.

I tried logging in to Cpanel, and that too was down, now this was beginning to smell fishy so I went back and dug up his web address, clicked the link, just to find that his entire site also down. When I went to the NS servers, I found that Apache was working on one server with nothing on it but the default apache settings and the other site was an electronic cigarette reseller site. At this point I went forward with the next step and emailed the guy but of course the email was also hosted on this server and so that too was returning as an undeliverable.

At this point I went back on eBay and looked him up, although his rating wasn't great it would suffice and the reason for that is that when people buy something and they receive it, they typically leave feedback based on their experience with the seller and the transaction, and so the seller had good feedback from buyers of this type of hosting service, however what was interesting to me from past months when I looked him up again was that when I needed to buy reseller service from him for me to become a reseller for a project I needed some accounts for, he told me he no longer had reseller packages that I needed but could rather sell something similar to me which would give me less for more money.

He told me that he needed to upgrade his server to allow for more people and then he would re-open the reseller side of things and I could get what I needed, this never happened and luckily I never spend any more money on him. As I would occasionally come back to his auction page I began to notice that he no longer sold any type of hosting services of any size and this seemed odd to me. Here's a web host who used to make all of his money on selling web hosting and now he is selling used mufflers and such.

I found him on Facebook and added him as a friend, to this day he has not actually approved of our friendship J and my request is still pending. As this was all developing, I began contacting some of his past customers who have bought any type of hosting from this seller. I emailed these people asking if these too are experiencing this type of problem and everyone who had responded was mad with him and had gone through the same process I just described as far as payment cancelations, and great service at first, and then no service later, etc, etc. One of the buys was from outside of the U.S. and could not do anything about it and so decided to just leave it be, while others were very upset with him.

In the process, I've lost three sites with content and database entries, site backups, email boxes with emails, one forum I was developing a scene on and a ton of forum members, one gallery, and one sequential auto responder that that took me forever to set up. And while I do have backups of content, and although I had weekly DB backups emailed to me, this does not change anything because after a couple of months or so, his host started bandwidth throttling, and limiting my usage of RAM which caused many errors on my content management system and in turn leaked into the backups.

It would seem that because I have backups of content I should be fine with another host or platform even but the truth is that because he just disappeared into thin air, I am now unable to set up 301 redirects and when I repost all of my old posts on the new server, whoever that may be, Google and other search engines still reference the old URL structure which I am unable to replicate. Basically, I decided to go with Blogger.com and transferred my domain there, the problem with this is that Blogger.com does not allow you to change permalinks; therefore I need to wait for Google to eventually come around and re-index the site. The problem with this is that A) I lose traffic I worked hard to attain; B) I lose SERP positions; C) I may be hit with duplicate content penalties; and D) All of my postings which took months to develop, are now all listed on the same day and month which is never a good thing in terms of SEO because you want to show gradual development.

In the midst of this move, I have of course lost a whole bunch of the tools I have grown accustomed to and because Blogger is not open-source and not self-hosted, I am unable to edit as much of the code as I was able to with WordPress. I no longer have the same type of control I had over SEO and am now left with a stable and reliable albeit very closed system. I could have avoided the permalinks structure issue by simply going to another host, setting up WP and setting the same link structure and everything would have been fine or at least better than now, but after this experience I decided at least for this blog here, to let blogger take care of my backups, spam detection, and the general headaches associated with self-hosted blogs.

The issue here is that I was hosting multiple sites, forums, and other things which required time and patience to develop and now they are all gone. All links that I've been building are also gone, traffic has gone down considerable and of course I understand why and generally I feel cheated. The community I've been developing has been cheated and destroyed all because some guy decided to take their money and disappear. Well guess what, I went back and found his WHOis information and found his personal email, home address, cell phone number, and other information, when I call his cell phone it is his phone number based on the voice mail that I get, however he never once picked up the phone.

Looking back at this, I remember having feelings that something was not right, from disappearing hosting auctions, to metering, to non-response to emails and support tickets, to cancelled PayPal payments and more and yet I still believe that this guy was legit, he had an American first and last name, he looked like he was born and raised in the states, he wasn't your stereotypical scammer and the idea that he would leave his first and last name around, and his phone and address so public further reassured me of his legitimacy, but I was wrong and so were countless others.

The moral of the story is that you should always go with a reputable web host and eliminate as much headache from your life as possible, for now being that this site makes little to no money for me, I am going to keep it hosted on Blogger.com and will look for other hosting solutions for my other web sites. I am glad I didn't purchase reseller hosting from his because now I would be in the position of answering tough questions from people who would now be paying me for hosting and who lost their priceless data.

Live and learn, and I hope that although this was a long post quite possibly not the most entertaining, hopefully you learning something good and positive because as they say, it is always better to learn from others' mistakes. Well folks, let me be the first to admit that I made a mistake I will not be repeating.