A Passion for Running

Saturday, March 4th was almost perfect. It began with an early morning swim and coffee with my bud, followed by a pretty relaxed afternoon. I think I did very little renovation-wise that day. That evening, we went to Aaron’s housewarming where we had great food and drink and the best time.

Upon arriving home I found emails from Jon, Pam and Dawn all alerting me to the fact that completerunning was offline.

Every website including ours has downtime but usually these are of no consequence. Usually, they are only for a few minutes or, at most, a couple of hours. Usually, a little investigation reveals a minor problem that is solved quickly with no harm done…

But this one wasn’t a usually thing. Upon logging into my control panel, I was confronted with what looked like an empty domain. Imagine you turned your computer on one day and EVERY single file inside it was gone without a trace. That’s what completerunning looked like on our control panel.

My first thought was that we’d been hacked and someone erased everything. I changed all the passwords (like that would help now!) and got ready to contact the host to restore our files. Then I saw something – our home folder, tucked away inside another folder called “suspended”. Suspended?

That “suspended” folder was the beginning of the end of us being hosted by iPowerweb. Here’s how things went:

- I got online with their 24/7 chat service where I waited 10 minutes only to be referred to support@ipowerweb.com
- I traded emails with that address only to be told I needed to contact abuse@ipowerweb.com . I asked why I had to contact them – that I was in no way abusing my service and inquired why THEY couldn’t get those people to contact ME.
- I sent an email to the abuse people. That email turned into several emails taking TWO DAYS between us.

The conversation basically went like this:

Us: Hey! What’s going on? Why has our account been suspended?
Them: Your domain had a spike of traffic on Saturday so we took it offline so it wouldn’t affect our server.
Us: What caused the spike?
Them: Your blogs. Here’s a log of the activity.
Us: Well, that looks like a Denial of Service attack to us. Can you verify that’s what it was because the amount of traffic we got on Saturday was about 10 times what we get on a given day.
Them: It’s your blogs. Agree to take them down, and we will unsuspend you.
Us: It’s not our blogs. It was a DoS attack. Please check and confirm the real problem here.
Them: It’s your blogs. We won’t unsuspend you until you agree to take them down.
Us: You are not hearing us. We are victims. You are letting the attackers win!
Them: It’s your blogs. We will only agree to unsuspend you when you agree to take your blogs down.

Get the picture?

So, after the last email, we threw up our hands and began backing everything up. It took about two days to do that and move to the new host – dreamhost. Luckily, I’ve got two other domains there so, although time consuming, the move was pretty easy.

But ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!