If a hosting service shuts you down for TOS, do they delete your site or just shutdown access?

December 5, 2005 9:43 AM

If a hosting service shuts you down for TOS, do they delete your site or just shutdown access?

I'm helping an organization whose site comes up 403. I know why you get that error, but the people in charge of the organization are short on technical information ("I prefer to use the phone"). They still get "email_at_theirdomain.com" so it seems odd that it would be TOS that makes the site give that error. But they just don't have a lot of information to give me and the hosting service is VERY unresponsive. Anyway I can figure out the problem with a workaround?

posted by nramsey to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

From what I've seen, when a hosting company closes an account for some reason (failure to pay, TOS violation) it usually results in a page that says "This account has been suspended", usually with a link or redirect to the hosting company's home page, or a generic "cPanel" logo (or whatever host manager software they use.) If you are simply getting a "403 Forbidden" page without any of that then chances are someone might have simply screwed up when updating a .htaccess file or something. Either way, chances are good that the ftp login still works and if you had the appropriate username/password you could log on and retrieve the site's file, or even fix the .htaccess problem. If the email still works then try to find out the stored login name and password from whatever email program they're using and try logging in to the ftp server with that. Or just ask them to try any username/pw combos they could possibly think of in the ftp program.

(and then tell them to get a fricking clue and take some responsibility for at least recording these things somewhere, sheesh)
posted by Rhomboid at 10:10 AM on December 5, 2005

It depends. What does it say in the Terms & Conditions? I own a small web hosting provider, and would never delete *any* customer files, even if there was a TOS violation. Generally, providers just throw up a redirect page on the offending site. It's likely that email is still working because it's unrelated to the issue at hand. Also, they probably want to make sure that they can communicate with the customer.

Who is the host? How exactly have they been unresponsive so far? (ie, when did you contact them and what was the result)Does your client not have any local backup of the files they shuffled off to the hosting provider?
posted by drstein at 12:39 PM on December 5, 2005

Seriously, is no one able to log into the hosting account? If they are, try uploading various files (e.g. "test.html") and see if you can reach them ("domain.com/test.html"). Look at the permissions on key files like "index.html". Pretty straightforward, and would explain why the ISP isn't much interested in hand-holding.
posted by dhartung at 7:25 PM on December 6, 2005