Mi blog lah! Το ιστολόγιό μου

No, it's not my domain that sucks, it's mydomain.com sucks, a web-hosting company.

Last June I chose mydomain.com to move my website to, as they had a special offer for a domain transfer and webhosting. Since my needs for my Website were specific, I gladly accepted the offer.

Since then, the service was good; I did not have to bother them as everything was working ok and I could find my way with installing software on my site.

It was a Sunday near the end of April that when I tried to access my site, I found that I exceeded my monthly quota. Due to this, my Website gets blocked and any access was replaced with a generic "Blocked" page. This page has ads and makes money over my expense (the referenced links gain from the popularity of my Website when GoogleBot visits).

In one respect it is a compliment to have your Website become popular and exceed its bandwidth. However, before buying more bandwidth, I wanted to make sure when the new month starts and the bandwith is set to zero. Surprisingly, this information was not on the notification. By the way, notifications are not sent to you by e-mail; they are stored on the Web hosting administration pages, so if you do not visit that page you aremore than likely to miss it. At this point I noticed something strange; since my website was blocked, there was additional traffic arriving which was strange. No, the block page was a HTTP redirect to another web server so any traffic would be minimal (200 bytes per hit?). Due to my website being blocked, I was unable to connect with FTP to access my files either.

"No, we use a rolling 30-day period to calculate your monthly bandwidth. Therefore, there is no day after which your bandwith is set to zero", I was told by the customer support. A rolling 30-day period simply means that every morning your bandwidth for the last 30 days is calculated. If it is under the limit, you get access today, else you are blocked. "So, this means that my 30-day bandwidth total will be smaller tomorrow and I may get access?", I recounted. "No, it is actually possible that the bandwidth may increase and you will still be blocked", he explained. "Can you tell me the daily bandwidth consumption for the last few days?", I insisted. "No, we do not keep daily bandwidth consumption.", he fired back. I don't want to be pushy here, as a web hosting company you need to keep daily bandwidth consumption if you want to use the rolling 30-day period system; you need to know the bandwidth of the oldest day so that you take it off when a new day gets completed.
The following days had this pattern; I would see in the administrative pages of mydomain that the "Bandwidth Used this month" was increasing steadily. I would call the customer support and try to explain that this rolling 30-day period is not working. And no, I do not want to upgrade my bandwidth because something is wrong with your systems.

It is quite funny how ridiculous the situation became. The customer support would not accept that there is a problem with their system. They tried to be polite and professional but it did not work well. I got the "Oh, it's you again" attitude and at some point I heard laughter in the background. Imagine this family conversation at bedtime, "Darling, how was job today?" "We had this crazy customer telling us we don't know how to do our job".

The customer support telephone number is 360-253-2210 which is in Vancouver, WA (US). And it was not outsourced to another country. The customer support explained that the web hosting business is in the same building as well.
Eventually they realised that I might have a point and they promised to investigate. They would send an e-mail to me about it. The next day comes and there was no e-mail (I never received an e-mail). However, my website was up and running. The administrative pages showed that I was given some extra bandwidth. On the other hand, the 30-day bandwidth value never decreased but kept increasing steadily. The access to my website was really good for me as I managed to back up every single bit of my files (and mysql database!). In addition, I grabbed a copy of the log files (the log files of the last 30 days, each day as an individual file).
I enjoyed the extra bandwidth bonanza for a while and when I was blocked again, I got back on the phone. "Bandwidth keeps increasing very quickly, and btw, I wrote a script that parses the log files and shows a substantial discrepancy between MY values and YOUR values", I started. "Sir, you need to upgrade your bandwidth or change hosting plan" he repeated. Somehow I was not suggested this time to wait for my bandwidth to drop.

Eventually I managed to get them to admit that the system that checks the bandwidth is faulty,

As a customer I am not happy with this resolution. My monthly bandwidth is below the hosting plan limit so I should get full service. However, MyDomain does not acknowledge that.

I was quite happy to get the initial offer for a domain name and web hosting bundle last year. I would not mind to keep my webhosting there for the next year. However, this attitude is unacceptable.
We are in May now and I have already moved to a new webhosting company. This is a small company and there is a person behind it that you can contact and have a conversation. The Web hosting features are much more advanced and I have full access to all the features. I'll write about this in a few weeks (if I encountered a problem or all are well). If you are on the technical side, you can find which company it is.

I just checked the mydomain bandwidth quota. Obviously it is not increasing anymore (I moved away from them) but it did not drop a tiny bit.
The customer support number 360-253-2210 corresponds to several companies, namely Dotster, Hostlane, 000domains, SignatureDomains, and NameZero, to name a few. That is, it looks that all these companies are the same with different fronts so that they capture more customers. Therefore, be prepared when calling their customer support number.