Wednesday we received a mail from our web hosting service (100 Megs Web Hosting) saying that our site was too busy and generating too much traffic and that they turn off our site at the end of the day (note this was all done by e-mail without any confirmation that we had received these mails). We checked our statistics and we had used only 50% of our bandwidth for the month and never exceeded our limit. We were well under our maximum disk capacity too.
We responded saying we did not understand how we had exceeded our limits and asked them not to turn off our site without explaining it further. In reponse they immediately terminated our service and prevented us accessing our databases online. They put up a blanket web page suggesting we had not paid our bill and this was why we had been terminated, when in fact we are paid up a year in advance.
They then tried to blackmail us in to paying them more money. At the time we relucantly agreed, telling them we felt blackmailed in to it. This time they responded by saying we could not have an upgrade and that all legal documentation should be forwarded to their head office, and ignored further e-mails. Eventually, after finding personal contact details for the owner (luckily one of the team lives near their office), we managed to get the essential database off them for the forum.
During the process of transfer our e-mail has been interrupted and many mails have just disappeared without trace. If anyone sent us mails over teh last 2 days please send them again as we did not receive them.
We have spent the last 2 days rebuilding the site from scratch with a new host.
The next step is to decide if it's worth pursuing legal action against these bunch of cowboys for the lost revenue, loss of reputation, time wasted and loss of data.
As far as we know everything is back to normal now, but you may find it takes time for all teh servers around the world to propagate the DNS settings. Let us know if you experience any problems.
All I can say is, make sure you never ever use 100 megs web hosting and feel free to say as much to anyone you meet!
That's it, rant over. Now lets get back to the business of making games
The Slitherine Team
