Netfirms Deleted my Account – Update 1

Received this email from Netfirms this morning:
Hello Ken,

I am writing this email in response to your inquiry on Support ticket #**********. I have noticed that on September 6, 2011 we have sent an email for Over Disk Space Quota to your email address ****************@gmail.com. Since there was no contact from you regarding this issue, we have suspended for being over quota on September 28, 2011. Also, on the same date we have sent an email to your email address *****************@gmail.com to upgrade your account to Netfirms Domain Parking Upgrade for 1.95/month.

In order to restore the services for your account, you need to upgrade to a hosting account or clear out the files. Since you have not upgraded to a hosting account or clear out the files from your account, we have deleted your account ‘**************’ on October 11, 2011.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We are available 24×7.

Sincerely,

*******************
Billing Specialist

My Response:
This is TOTALLY unacceptable. Every email that I received from Netfirms urged me to upgrade my hosting. I cancelled my hosting account years ago because of Netfirms’ slow page loading times.

Further – not one of the emails mentioned anything about my account being deleted outright – as it shouldn’t, since I have many domain names registered through Netfirms. Through these domains I run businesses and this incompetent action on Netfirms’ part has ground my business’ operation to a standstill.

On Sunday, I ran a Groupon special directing people to my photography website – www. heatherswanner.com. Had your company arbitrarily deleted my account 72 hours earlier, it would have cost me $11,000 is sales. Every day that my sites are down, I’m losing a considerable amount of money and leads. In addition to this, I’m fairly certain that irreparable damage has been done to this business’ reputation due to a glaring error on Netfirms part. My potential new clients think that I don’t have a website, and emailed inquiries are bouncing back to their senders.

Quite frankly, you have done more than treat another customer poorly, or caused a minor headache. You have cost me a considerable amount of money, and completely disregarded a contractual agreement as my domain registrar. Regardless of any new “domain parking” account structure you’ve created, you can not simply send the domains that I rightfully own back into the free market.

I spoke with a CSR at length yesterday regarding this matter and he assured me he had created a new account, – username “mattswanner” and that within 24 hours, all of my paid domains would be back and operating normally. I expect no further communication from Netfirms regarding this matter unless it is directly related to the status of you correcting this problem, and getting my businesses back online.

This needs to be a top priority.

-Matt Swanner
919.995.2029

Netfirms DELETED my account!

My wife and I run a pretty successful little boutique photography studio here in Cary, NC and this past Sunday, we ran a special with Groupon for a Fall/Winter portrait sitting.

Imagine my dismay when, after an hour dealing with Netfirms tech support, I learned that they deleted my account – sending approximately 15 paid domains into hold (the first step in losing ownership of a domain).

I didn’t cancel my account. There were no credit card/payment issues. Netfirms just arbitrarily DELETED my account and have offered no explanation for doing so. So while I sit here pondering the lost Groupon sales (thousands of dollars based on the first two days performance) and wondering what kind of damage has been done to my business’ reputation, I figure “why not blog about it?”

It will apparently take Netfirms 24 hours to get my sites back up. That’s a lot of lost Groupon sales. I wonder how many times I can tweet this blog post in 24 hours?

Way to fail Netfirms. Way to fail. Further bulletins as events unfold…

Bludomain hacked

As a follow-up to this post – My wife’s Bludomain site – Heather Swanner.com is being hacked EVERY DAY. I fix it, and the next day it is down again. I contacted them and let them know what’s going on and aside from a canned response I haven’t gotten much – pretty disappointing.

In the meantime I simply used htaccess to redirect index.php to home.php since this exploit apparently only affects files named index.php or login.php

If you’re having trouble with your blu site being hacked on a regular basis and only displaying something like:

“Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING, expecting ‘,’ or ‘;’”

as a result, please leave a comment. More importantly if you’ve discovered a reasonable solution I’d love to hear it as well. Thanks.