Hi, I hope some people will be able to offer me some advice, but this has made me really angry... On June 17th, I saw this thread advertising a reasonable hosting service. I was looking for proxy hosting so sent a PM to ask if proxies were allowed. I recieved a quick response stating: 'Proxys are allowed as long as the do not breach the TOS, where it states the site cannot take more then 5% of cpu power.' I sent a PM back asking what exactly that meant, and recieved this reply: 'Well the servers are extremely powerful and it would take a great deal to max them out. 5% equals to about 5TB within one day. Which is 5000GB I have to state this when people have proxys on our servers. But for the price of £7.99 for the year then you cant really go wrong.' I decided to go for 10 accounts, which he did for £50 for the year. I sent this via paypal. Most of my accounts were set up as I requested them over the next few days. Everything was okay, I was happy with it. On the morning of June 30th, I noticed that 4 of my sites were displaying disabled messages stating that I had exceeded my bandwidth or broken the TOS. My busiest sites were still working okay - the ones that had been disabled were doing less than 250mb of bandwidth a day - nowhere close to the 5000gb a day quoted as being a problem. A few hours later, and everything went down - all 9 of my proxies, Glen's pages (including the hosting site thehosters.co.uk) and other sites hosted with him. This time they displayed a message saying service disabled - but presumably from Heart Internet and not thehosters.co.uk (if you read the original hosting thread you'll see Heart provide the hosting). I contacted Glen, but didn't recieve a reply until the next day (July 1st), although to be fair he hadn't been online before this either. He said: 'Hi Johnny, Sorry for all this I am trying to get it all fixed. Ive had a few probs but im working on it all to get it back online. Should be about 1 hour mate.' Sure enough, everything was working an hour or so later, and I took this to be a one off error which can happen. However, the next morning (July 2nd), 4 of my sites again displayed thehosters.co.uk disabled message - and not the same 4 as before. Within a couple of hours, all but one were disabled. I PMd Glen and got a message back later that day: '"This is not the servers going down, this is the engineers who I do not have control over placing the sites in lock, I have requested reports from them, TheHosters is governd by HeartInternet and they look after all the servers, if they choose to close a site then I have no choice but to do what they request. As i stated if the server load reaches a certain point then it is automatic. Ill find out what I can do to get these back online thanks." I knew that there was something VERY wrong here as my sites were not anywhere near to the bandwidth Glen quoted as being a problem - there was no way that the sites were even doing three figure bandwidth collectively a day, let alone seperately and four figures! I just couldn't understand the logic in the disabling - especially as noted earlier when some sites were doing a matter of mb a day. I replied to Glen asking for this to be sorted within a few hours, or I would want a refund and move hosts. No reply despite being active on DP. A few hours later I PMd asking for a refund since this was not working for either of us. No reply. He has been online several times a day since then, but has not replied to any PMs. I posted in the original thread offering hosting (link above - note he confirms that proxies are okay), but no reply. No answer to the phone numbers listed on thehosters.co.uk either. I contacted Heart Internet, who told me that in no circumstances were proxy sites allowed on their servers - and this was the only reason my accounts were disabled. I posted this in the thread, but no reply. I escalated this in paypal, but they have responded saying that they can't give money back for 'virtual' items. However, they did say that I should pursue legal action against Glen. This morning I noticed that Glen had started a thread offering services here. I replied to this thread, and asked why I was being ignored and for my refund. He replied in the thread: ' I have not ignored any pm's, and I have explained why your hosting accounts where disabled, when you signed up you agreed to the TOS and I clearly stated this to you aswell. If you wish to appeal this decision please confirm this in a written letter. Please refrain from posting this inside threads which are unrelevant.' I can't see where he has explained why my accounts have been disabled - which I now know to be because the hosting which is he is reselling does not allow proxies. Clearly, he misrepresented this to me, and it seems fairly obvious that he should refund me - I only had a little over a week of working hosting and abided by the TOS. To ask for written discussion is ridiculous when all sales and support is done online. UK law actually states that emails are a form of written communication I just can't see any logic for keeping money when a service is not being provided! I have tried to post this as accurately as I can with as much information as possible, rather than just getting angry about it all, but it has really upset me - I feel like £50 has been stolen from me. I don't want to bog down other threads about it - and think that I have been really patient with this. Since paypal can not help, I believe my only option is to proceed with a small claims court case against him, which I will do if he doesn't refund me. What do other people think? I'd really appreciate any thoughts on this...
I'm sorry for your troubles. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Proxies really aren't cut out for shared hosts, despite what some customer-hungry hosts might say. "5% equals to about 5TB within one day." This statement makes no sense at all. Bandwidth usage and CPU usage are two different things. To me, it looks like your host is inexperienced. A busy proxy can easily top 5% CPU usage. Do you know what stats program was used to calculate the bandwidth? Some can be very inaccurate when it comes to proxies. From what it seems, Heart Internet saw the proxies and disabled them. Your host seems to have violated their terms by hosting a client with proxies. He should have read over his provider's TOS before accepting you as a client. How long have you been waiting for for a refund? If you don't get one, why don't you just go knock on his front door? I'm guessing if you picked a UK host, you live in the UK, right? Well, it's not that big of an island, is it? Here's the WHOIS info for thehosters.co.uk. I personally host my proxies on a dedicated server. You may want to look into a low end dedicated server or VPS for your proxy sites. I know of a good dedicated server provider who hosts my sites. If you are interested, pm me. Best of luck!
Looks like you're dealing with a kid in a bedroom, you'll most likely get nowhere with them as it's a waste of time. Just find a better host - www.layeredtech.com do cheap dedicated servers, but they're in the US. If you want UK VPS try www.ikhost.net. It's £7.99. That's pretty much the cost of a train ticket from Surrey to Colchester.. is it really worth it? In terms of small claims it's worth absolutely nothing - and infact it's only advised for you to take anything to a small claims court if the value which you're claiming for is over £100. You could always sue for breach of contract, but since it looks like a 12 year old kid you're dealing with I'm not too sure on the legalities for suing minors.
£7.99 for a year? That is about $11.00 a year, less than $1.00 a month. This should have been your first clue. Unfortunately, you sometimes get what you pay for in this industry. Next time, open one account and see how it goes unless you are going with a well known company. And check the IP address to see who owns it and if you are dealing with a reseller. You can attempt to sue him, but chances are it would cost you more money and your valuable time.
..just for the record at current exchange rates that's more like $16 (weak dollar <3) Another thing. With these cheap hosting costs you'll be sure to be slapped on an inexpensive server. These days it's all about dual-quad core Xeons and 16GB of RAM, not your weedy little entry level eMachine. Obviously you can draw conclusions easily as to which one is the one you want your domain to be on
Like sombody suggested. Go round to the house, knock on his door, put the fear of god in the little punk and take your £50 to the pub for a few pints. Sorted.
Can I ask what proxy means in the whole context of your posts? BTW, I must admit, he does look like akid in the back bedroom from his avatar in that thread you posted!
Im gussing he owns and wants to run his own proxy website, which is a website where you can mask your internet location. For example, if you are banned on a forum, you can go to a proxy website, enter the URL of the forum your banned on and then create a new account and continue to use the forum under an assumed alias and different IP (internet location)
I'm glad you posted that way Carl. Which more or less gets at the heart of why I asked him to be more specific. ..because what would be essential here was what was in the mind of the .. eh.. business kid he dealt with. Was he guessing the same as you or was he guessing he wanted proxy hosting that would allow him to access his hosting account from a proxy server. This was not clear from his original post, and I am wondering if it was any clearer in his enquiry to the business kid. If it was not, I would put it down to bad choice, and lack of understanding on the part of what looks like nothing more than a kid in his back bedroom - and then just leave it at that. I wouldn't cast any aspersions on the fact that he looks like nothing more than a kid either. Being nothing more than a kid did not stop Sean Belnick from becoming a juvenile millionaire selling office chairs from his back bedroom.
Hi guys, Thanks for your posts. Can I just confirm that I paid £50 for this hosting ~$100 at current rates. I chose this host because he confirmed that I could host my proxy websites (in the sense that Carlx described), and because he was UK based (as I am), as I had heard horror stories about eastern European and Indian hosts and their shocking support. Looking at Glen's website, it looked as though he was the MD of a large hosting company with a large financial turnover (i was never made aware that he was a reseller until I tried getting my money back and dug a little deeper). His profile picture has also changed since I took out the hosting - I'd have been put off by his 'myspace style' avatar. Since Glen cut off my hosting I have tried another 6 or so hosts (all found through DP), all of which have cut off hosting, had server problems and so on. Many of these have also stolen my money. *sigh* I know I need either really good VPS or dedicated server for these sites, but at the moment my earnings simply cannot justify this expense. With all the hosting problems I have had over the last few months my traffic (and earnings) have really dropped off. Because of all the hosts refusing to refund me, my sites have not even covered what I paid for them. I really don't know what to do now, if I had covered what I had spent I would just cut my losses and pull the sites, but as it is, I have spend a considerable sum of money as well as many, many hours trying to fix these sites so it seems a shame to let them go. Suggestions appreciated. JB
If you look through the Proxy.org Commercial Exchange forum (register to see it) or maybe even the forums here, you will find offers for free proxy hosting. These hosts will host your sites for free, but place banner ads or pop-unders on your proxified pages, leaving you to put ads on the homepage. Use of these hosts until you're making enough to get a VPS or low-end dedicated server. Right now proxies are out of season since school is out, but expect traffic to pick up soon as schools come back in session over the next two months. As for the 6 or so hosts you signed up for, it probably states in their TOS that they can refuse to refund you if you violate the TOS, which probably could be violated at most hosts by running a proxy or any process that takes up a lot of resources. Cut the loss and move on. Best of luck!
I agree - These kids are over nighters. Sure it might be ok when the going is good but they lack life experience and ultimately any problem resolution skills. As soon as the going gets tough they'll just pack up and move onto the next sucker.