I am being held hostage by my own web hosting company! For several years my brother and I have volunteered to maintain the website for a local non-profit club. The Board of the club elected to use a local father-and-son internet company in a nearby town. They hosted it since the beginning and we did all the maintenance and the club paid the bills on time and everybody was happy.
So this morning we went to make a minor change on the site, but we couldn't log in. So we called the guy at the hosting company and he said that from now on, only customers who used them as their ISP too could update websites hosted there! Otherwise, presumably, we'd have to pay them regular maintanance $$$ for the updates we once made ourselves. Neither me nor my brother use them as our ISP, and we have no plans to switch over under such blackmail, so we demanded that they put it back the way it was. They refused and told us to find somebody else to host the site! And then they switched us off. So now, whenever anybody logs-in to our .ca domain name all that comes up is an ad for their stupid little backwoods web hosting company! They have hijacked our own domain name (fully paid-for) and stolen it away from us!!! Unbelievable!!!
So now the question is, how do we claim it back? Can our next web hosting company simply take control of it from them, or will we need to call in the lawyers? Also, how common is this tactic? Has it happened to anybody else? Help!
So this morning we went to make a minor change on the site, but we couldn't log in. So we called the guy at the hosting company and he said that from now on, only customers who used them as their ISP too could update websites hosted there! Otherwise, presumably, we'd have to pay them regular maintanance $$$ for the updates we once made ourselves. Neither me nor my brother use them as our ISP, and we have no plans to switch over under such blackmail, so we demanded that they put it back the way it was. They refused and told us to find somebody else to host the site! And then they switched us off. So now, whenever anybody logs-in to our .ca domain name all that comes up is an ad for their stupid little backwoods web hosting company! They have hijacked our own domain name (fully paid-for) and stolen it away from us!!! Unbelievable!!!
So now the question is, how do we claim it back? Can our next web hosting company simply take control of it from them, or will we need to call in the lawyers? Also, how common is this tactic? Has it happened to anybody else? Help!
