BANS --- This Account Suspended

I'll give you the short answer. BANS is simply a platform for building websites like WordPress and others. Yes, it populates the site with pages relating to the niche you've chosen, but, like any other site, you have to do all the necessary SEO work and promotion to achieve rankings. That is, if you're going for organic traffic. One of the reasons for the good reviews is that once the work is done, eBay converts very well for a lot of us. That's been my experience so far. Once the forum is back up, you'll find a great deal of guidance in this regard.

 

I hate to beat a dead horse, especially since I'm a satisfied BANS customer, but your site has been down for a loooong time now. You guys have a booming business and unless your hosting company is run by your mom or your brother or something, I would have been gone at least 24 hours ago. I can not think of any valid excuse as to why your site would be down this long. You guys are smart and I don't want to tell you how to run your business, but you really should bail on these guys whoever they are and find a real hosting company. Just my 2 cents.

 

You kinda answered your own questions. The sites that are "making it" are the ones doing the keyword research. Yes the bulk of a BANS site is auto-populated Ebay feeds, but the page titles, H1 tags, Meta Descriptions, Keywords, URLs etc., not to mention whatever content you can scrounge up either for the store pages and content pages is there for you to be optimized based on your keyword research.

 

To add to what SEOWarrior and Potentmix have already said I'd recommend that if you aren't already you follow this ongoing BANS tutorial which contains a lot of great advice:

http://www.thenichestorebuilder.com/the-foundation-of-building-a-niche-store-empire-in-12-weeks.htm

Believe me I'm well aware of the situation and what is and isn't acceptable. We've been building internet businesses for several years and have had our fair share of problems - hacking, hosting downtime - as most everyone does but never anything on this scale.

We already have another server set up ready and waiting. Our problem is that we still cannot access all of the files on the old server (forum, scripts which perform various functions, member lists etc) and hence can't complete the transfer.

For BANS members reading this - the account suspension message from your V2 admin panels should now be gone and if you go to the Build A Niche Store home page and click on the link for members you will see an explanation of what has happened.

Thanks for your continued patience and for the messages of support we've received.

As I'm sure you can imagine this weekend has been about as stressful as it gets.

Kelvin

 

Thanks, Kelvin, for responding to these posts in an obviously difficult situation, and thanks for not only making such a great product in BANS, but for the BANS forum as well, as a lot of us are just itching to get back in!

 

No backups? Should consider nightly remote backups of data and files in the future.

h

 

I just have one question with regards to the BANS site being hacked - Does this mean that BANS customers private details have been compromised ?

Many thanks

 

It totally sucks and I don't mean to be critical, but why not at the very least point the domain to a page that at least shows your logo and some "Sorry for the temporary outage, we'll be back soon" kind of message. Seeing the generic CPanel "This account has been suspended" message for days on end can't be a good thing. Anyway, I hope you guys are back up soon as you've got a nice product and you obviously put a lot of thought and hard work into it.

 

Seowarrior,

There is now a message for members. Go to buildaniche store homepage and then click through the member's link as per Kelvin's post above.

 

Ahh...ok. My bad. Thanks........

 

We have back ups from the 13th but we didn't want to lose a day unless we had to. We had expected it to be back online by now so that we could do a complete transfer over to a new dedicated server without losing anything.

The server is down - that's it. None of our records have been accessed.

The home page and member message went up last night.

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To all BANS members I can confirm that the forum and support center will be back up and running tomorrow.

Thanks for your continued patience.

Kelvin

 

Thanks for the heads up Kelvin - much appreciated.

 

Does this mean the bug fix will be pushed back, or will that also be released on monday?

 

It's back up and running now.

 

Still down here.

 

I keep reading over and over BANS is NOT hosted at HG,
Do a WHOIS on BANS and they are indeed hosted at HG.
Domain servers point to NS667.HOSTGATOR.COM and NS668.HOSTGATOR.COM.

It doesn't make much sense to point your DNS to HG if you arent there????

Not that it really maters because BANS is stand up product, but thought I would point this out. Seems the HOSTGATOR guy isn't off his medications after all

 

Looks like it's back down again. I believe they just switched to HostGator, however. They'll have to work out the kinks.

 

There won't be a delay - the bug fix is already complete and providing tomorrow goes smoothly it will be sent out during the afternoon.

Afraid you must have got a cookie.

We have multiple hosting accounts for different sites that we run. In order to remove the "account suspended" message from the V2.0 admin panels and get up a message on our site so that BANS members knew what was happening we switched the domain nameservers to our Hostgator account.

 

Kelvin, figured as much. Yeah because your credibility would take a minor hit considering as aggressive as BANS promotes HG. Glad to see you actually use a product you promote!

Starting my 2nd month with BANS and anxious to see how the long term pans out.

Hope all works out well

Labwiz

 

I appreciate that and I can assure you that we're not in the business of recommending services we don't use!

To be honest - it's getting to the point now that I won't use anyone but Hostgator.

I hope moving forward you find success with the product.

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For all BANS members who've been following this thread I'm happy to say that we're back up and running and an update email has gone out explaining what happened.

A big thank you for your patience. Your understanding has made what has been a really bad weekend more tolerable.

Kelvin