If you are one of the many people that came by one of my sites yesterday, you were met with the following page…
Luckily I found out within a few hours because I went to make a post in one of my blogs. It came as a complete surprise to me and I went straight on to contact Hostgator’s live support chat. The problem wasn’t really that my blogs were down because they are still quite new and the daily visitor count is only about 100 and they aren’t making that much money yet.
The much larger problem was that I recently decided to move all my sites from different hosts that I was using to Hostgator as my preferred host. At the time it seemed like a really good idea and I were able to save a fair amount in hosting fees. But when my account was suspended (= all my sites were made unavailable) the deal was no longer in my favor.
I’m glad that I wasn’t on vacation somewhere on a tropical island and that I found out as fast as I did. Otherwise it could easily have cost me an amount equal to many years of hosting.
If you wonder why my account was suspended in the first place then it was because I had been using an article from an article directory to create an auto-generated site (all credits were naturally given) that I have and that particular article was apparently stolen from another site which felt that I was stepping on their toes. They had filed a complaint and Hostgator had sent me an email telling me to remove the articles. I did that immediately and wrote Hostgator back that it had been done. But somehow they managed to overlook that email and suspended my account (and thereby all my sites) as “I didn’t respond and comply”.
After spending 15 minutes trying to guide the support person to the response I had already sent, he finally apologized and removed the suspension. Phew…
The moral of the story could be never to use articles from article directories but the complaint could easily have been made for something completely different, so I don’t see that as the moral. The lesson I have learned is that even though it might save you a few dollars to have one hosting account hosting all your sites you might want to spread them over several accounts and even several hosts. Otherwise you might find that something as simple as a complaint might be a costly affair.
