Hi
Thank you so much Matt, how can they call this a "dedicated" linux server lolol
incidently their banner at the top of their website reads 100% customer satisfaction guarenteed.
I asked the accounts guy last night if he was sure that distance selling act didn't apply to webhosting and thatwe were not paying £950 for 7 hours I would call trading standards - he said we are perfectly cabable of dealing with trading standards!
thanks again
Key

I would raise it with trading standards and send that letter. Will cost next to nothing but will show them that you mean business.

Matt

In reply to a post by keymaster:

Hi Lads,
thank you so much for all your posts which I missed, yes it is an £80 per month + set up fees etc came to £950 paid up front for the year by bank transfer, the company is eUKhosting.
I would say firstly we were missold this as we informed the salesman that the reason we were looking to change was that we had a problem with denial of service attacks...he said (and we have the log) this would not be an issue as their engineers were 24/7 and would spot the issue immediatly and block IP's if required.....in reality we were online for 7 hours on day 1 and they suspended the service - it has been like that since.
The "engineer" night before last said they couldn't stop the attack and we should have read the terms and conditions, nothing he could do, we were effecting other customers, I asked what he wanted us to do, he suggested we take business elsewhere or at least dns. we then received an email in the morning (day 2) saying they were unwilling to put site back up but no refunds were offered on dedicated linux servers from "senior systems admin".
I asked if this would be covered by distance selling laws with 7 day cooling off period, the "accounts department" said it wasn't".
many thanks
Key

Can you comfirm its http://www.eukhost.com/

Hi
Thanks again, I called the consumer direct people and they gave me a case number, a template letter to fill and said if I can provide logs of the chat she doesn't see anyway that we wont get her money back, she has also passed it over to trading standards for investigation, especially the banner at the top that flashes bold writing saying "100% satisfaction guarenteed" on all UK servers ha ha ha....
but we are still stuck with no host and nearly £1k out of pocket !
Key

Hi M8
Yes 100% confirm
Key

Interesting set of T&C's

7.4 Denial of Service (DOS) attacks directed at eUKhost, or any attempts to launch a DOS attack from our servers are strictly prohibited. All infractions and or suspected infractions will be vigorously investigated and may result in immediate termination of your Account.

So from what you have said they should have never sold to you .

15. Cancellations & Refunds

15.1 eUKhost reserves the right to suspend OR terminate services on receipt of abuse complaints.

15.2 An unconditional 30 day money back guarantee is provided on managed shared hosting, reseller hosting, semi-dedicated hosting and VPS solutions. Domain registration fees & dedicated server packages do not come under the purview of this guarantee. Refund requests after 30 days will be refunded on a prorated basis of any unused time.

Some products are exempt from the 7 day distance selling - such as aireline tickets (as i found out when I made a mistake on a purchase).

But most would expect 7 hours into a 12 month lease you would recieve back at lest 11 months hosting if not 11 months and 3 weeks.

We haven't started doing dedicated servers but will be later this year so its something we will have to consider ourselves.

As they are registered with companies house, and thus are a uk limited company the 7 day distance selling law and also services that are miss sold to you are the key here.

Reading T&C's when you are handing over £1k is a good idea.

Hi

Sorry to hear about your problem and hope this can be sorted. Regarding the Distance Selling Regulations, bear in mind these only apply to consumers, not business to business transactions. How your status is perceived may be important.

I imagine they consider themselves exempt on the basis that the service starts before the usual cancellation period expires. Every chance they are correct. Whether this applies to the whole contract or just one month will depend on the exact nature of the contract.

Even if the DSRs don't apply, that doesn't make them legally in the right, sounds as if they are not but pursuing the issue might be awkward. Much will depend whether a Small Claims Court are prepared to deal with this, they could do but have a reputation for passing over technical cases of any kind.

Heading to the High Court might not be rational over a dispute like this, costs will be way out of proportion to the amount. Neither might you see them back if you win, or even an award from the Small Claims Court. Collecting money is often different from having this awarded and in this case, the company concerned have issues beyond yours. They may well not be in a position to pay.

My suggestion would be to seek expert advice. By all means approach a solicitor if you can afford this and as a back up I will send you a contact in the UK by PM. He would not appreciate details being posted here but works for a leading NGO who deal with exactly this type of issue. Not impossible Trading Standards will have already passed details although don't hold your breath.

Whether he can help or not I have no idea but will email him to warn of the contact and at worst he can probably give you a clearer picture.

Hi Keymaster,

I would suggest in the future you get a server that is protected with an application layer firewall - it is somewhat specialised and almost no hosts actually offer it..

http://www.staminus.net/SecurePort-DDoS-Mitigation


http://www.ddosprotection.com/ddos_protection.htm

something like that is what you need.

A lot of these ddos providers are just resellers and dont actually have the bandwidth or offer a solution that will mitigate against attacks as any heavy attacks at >gbit/s will easily affect other customers on the same network regardless if you have a dedicated server or not.

Do you happen to know what is under attack? nameservers or webserver service itself?
do you also know what type of attack it is? (http, synflood, etc)

Edited by deleted (Mon 31-May-10 15:40:34)

if you haven't already started a thread on webhostingtalk i recommend you do, it's a good way to shame company MDs in to action.

Post deleted by billford