Advice needed on Hosting providers and being banned

[Spanky Deluxe]

Ok, I host several sites on www.uk2.net. On the 7th of July I got an email from them saying:

Hi Phil,

Unfortunately we have had no choice but to temporarily suspend your
website www.hellary.co.uk due to excessive server usage.

Please contact us ASAP to look into this matter, and to re-enable this
site.

You may want to consider upgrading your account to a dedicated server
to
resolve this, please follow this link to see our latest offers
<http://www.uk2.net/servers.shtml>.

Alternatively you may want to harden security on the blog to disallow
spammers posting comments (which is the cause of the overload).

Best regards,

UK2 Customer Service

I sent a reply saying I'd really like to fix this, to log in and remove all comment and trackback functions from my site. I've had enough of the spam too and so I'd be happy to do this.

No reply. I resent the email. No reply. I contacted them a few times with their online support text chat and they kept saying my site was disabled due to bandwidth being exceeded and that I should contact customer services.
What was really worrying me was that I couldn't even log into my domain on their site in order to purchase more bandwidth, it kept saying 'incorrect password, the owner has been notified'.
I thought I'd leave it until the end of the month when I should get more bandwidth. Then when nothing happened I thought I'd leave it for a month after it was taken offline. Still nothing.

I contacted them using the system on their website since the emails wasn't working saying:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Over a month ago I got an email saying that my domain was being taken down temporarily due to all of my bandwidth being used up by spammers abusing my website. My emails also went down in the process. I kept emailing for an explaination of what was going on as I couldn't even log into my domain to purchase more bandwidth. Its been a month now and I still haven't been able to log in and my domain is still not up and my email addresses still don't work.
What is going on? This is unacceptable service!! I can understand that if the bandwidth is exceeded then the site could go down for the rest of the month. I can't understand, however, why I can't log in to purchase more bandwidth, I can't access my ftp in order to remove the files that the spammers were abusing and I can't even get a decent reply from any of the support teams. I've tried using the live chat support thing on your website but all they ever say is contact the support department through email.
Please get my site back online and let me fix the problems. I am very fed up with all of this and would like someone to actually do something about this otherwise I shall be forced to switch providers.

I soon got a reply saying:

Hi Phil

I'm sorry to hear that nobody has got back to you yet over this issue.

I understand from our technicians that the problem was comment spamming on your bBlog installation, and that if you are prepared to either disable public comments or remove your bBlog altogether, we will lift the restrictions on your account. Please let me know if this is acceptable to you.

Regards

I replied back:

I have said several times that I want to get in there to remove the comment parts of the blog, I've been trying for a month to get in on ftp or through the uk2 web site to delete the files but I haven't been able to. I asked ages ago that the site be at least made viewable to my ip here so that I could log in through ftp and delete the necessary files. As soon as it allows me I will log in and make the changes.

Them:

Hi Phil,

You can FTP to your account using WS FTP client and delete the files under your owneship if you face problem you can repair FTP permission from your domain control panel under the section >> website control , click on quick fix and you can retry to delete the file.

If you still face any problem feel free to contact us back.

Kind Regards,
Regards,

me:

I would do this although I can't log in. It keeps saying password error although as far as I know I haven't changed my password. It also says 'owner was notified' but I haven't got any emails. I can log into my other domains but its not visible from there.
My current ip address is xx.xx.xx.xx if that helps at all.

Kind Regards,

and then finally them:

Hi,

Your domain www.hellary.co.uk is banned on 07-Jul-2006 due to overloading superultra9.

Regards,

I've replied back but I've got a bad feeling about all this. Do you guys think I'm in the right in feeling pi$$ed off at them? I mean I said from when they alerted me that I wanted to fix it, now it sounds like they're saying thats it, I've been banned. My whole primary email system has been down since it all goes through this domain too.

 

[zimv20]

Do you guys think I'm in the right in feeling pi$$ed off at them?

yes, in that they don't seem to have their crap together in providing you consistent or workable answers.

i've had several bad hosting experiences, and i've learned to test support and customer service of a candidate hosting service during the pre-sale. i say you find a new provider and shop around a bit more carefully. fwiw, i use hostgator.com and feel they provide consistently good support.

hopefully you have local copies of all installed software, database backups and maybe even an entire account dump (cpanel provides this function) so you don't even have to get your account reactivated to change.