View Single Post - Site outage - what a joke!

Doctor Feelgood · Administrator

So - we were offline for just over 24 hours and the reason is insane to me. I am on vacation with limited Internet, so fighting this has been frustrating to say the least.

I tried talking to my host, but the techs on the phone said the techs that could help me are available by the ticket system only. Uggh.

Anyway - one of the sites on our server - which I also own - is a short link creator. I can not control the things that people link to, but if something is reported to me as abusive / inappropriate I will delete it.

Well, someone made a link with my short link creator and used it in a SPAM email... Then someone that received the email didn't report the destination URL as SPAM, they reported the short link URL (it wasn't reported to me, but to one of the SPAM agencies which contacted my host). My host is then not smart enough to see that it is just a short link, and suspends not only the short link site, but every site on my server, because I am apparently hosting SPAM sites.

I explain that I am not hosting that site and for them to look at the link - it just redirects elsewhere - but that I will gladly delete that link.

The whole process took way too long with huge lapses between ticket responses and I still can't believe they don't understand what a short link creator is. Even at the end, they are refering to the links as "users" or "sites" on my VPS. Their just tiny database entries which create links. Uggh.

To me it seems like they tried to kill a fly with a hand grenade... Except this isn't even a real fly, it is just a picture of a fly.

Anyway - sorry for the down time - and now back to vacation.