DATAHAUS One-hosting.com Failure to provide service per contract. Ripoff New York New York

Our website went down, and remained down for a few days. The new IT Admin at the office decided to investigate.

The host / registrar is one-hosting.com / DataHaus LLC (an Enom registrar reseller).

He sent the following to Datahaus:
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"{NON-WORKING DOMAIN} appears to be down... we've tried several times over the past few hours to access it, and it still is not working."
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They replied:
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"seems you redirect to {CORPORATE WEBSITE} but this webhosting is DOWN !"
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We replied:
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"{CORPORATE WEBSITE} is NOT down... we can access it just fine by typing in {CORPORATE WEBSITE URL}. {MAIN COMPANY} is a large company, with an uptime guarantee from their host of 99.9%.

Perhaps your packet routing from the US to Charlestown, W.I. is not correct, which would explain why you cannot load {CORPORATE DOMAIN} and we can, and you can load {NON-WORKING DOMAIN} and we cannot.

We're having several problems here:
1) {NON-WORKING DOMAIN} is down. It was up a couple days ago, but it is down now.

2) We cannot access the Control Panel at https://www.one-hosting.com/members/user.php.... , so we cannot change anything about the domain.

3) The Administrative Contact for {NON-WORKING DOMAIN} is set up to be one-hosting.com... this should not be, the Administrative Contact should be {BUSINESS OWNER}. Otherwise, how can she authorize moving the domain? Answer: she cannot... only you could, and you would have a bias toward keeping the hosting and registration with you.

SO, this is what is going to happen:
1) You will do whatever is required to allow us access to the Control Panel, so the necessary information in the domain WHOIS can be changed to reflect the real administrative contact.

2) You will get our domain operational, at least long enough that we can pull the emails and HTML files off the servers.

3) We will then move the domain to GoDaddy hosting, where we have already procured a hosting arrangement.

If these three items above are not accomplished in a timely manner (two days), we'll be contacting ICANN and filing a complaint. The fact that you set yourself up as the domain Administrative contact for a domain you don't control is bad enough, the fact that the website isn't working is worse, the fact that we're locked out of the Control Panel so we can't make any changes to get it working is deplorable.

Lest you think you're dealing with {BUSINESS OWNER}, please disabuse yourself of that notion. I'm the new BOFH here at the office, with years of experience. If the above problems are not dealt with promptly, you'll be dealing with me."
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They replied:
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"WOW u r really offensive ! no need for that !

we will be happy to move the customer to you

we changed the whois and also unlocked the domain - feel free to transfer it away at any time"
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Well, what would you expect a person to be, when their web host is down for days on end, they don't even recognize when their own clients' websites are down, and they try to blame the problem on the main corporate website, which has an uptime guarantee of 99.9%?! Do they expect me to be sunny and cheerful?! Do they expect me to come with hat in hand, asking nicely if they would pretty please provide the services we've already paid for?!

Now, the website came up again (very briefly) late Saturday night (around 11:00 pm). It was down again by Sunday morning, and has been down ever since. We still cannot access the Control Panel to make any changes to the domain, and we still can't access email to transfer the existing emails from the one-hosting.com servers to our new GoDaddy hosting.

We paid for hosting, and hosting is not being provided.

We're paid up on our hosting arrangement with one-hosting.com until 24Apr2007, so why aren't they providing the service we paid for?

And why do they make it a practice of placing themselves as the Administrative Contact in the domain WHOIS for domains they do not control?

And why have they not issued any explanation as to why the domain and email services we've paid for have been unavailable to us for the past week?

And why are those services STILL unavailable to us?

And do you think we'll get a pro-rated refund on our already-paid hosting agreement with them? I highly doubt it.

Avoid this web host if you want to avoid hosting headaches.

BOFH
San Francisco, California
U.S.A.