How to a prevent my Hosting Company from holding my web site for RANSOM!?

Question

I've come to the conclusion that my hosting company are cowboys and I want to change to a different company.
How do I go about shifting the web site to another company and what options do I have if they DONT co-operate?

Answer 1

surely you have your website saved on a hard drive somewhere? why not just cancel your contract and find a new host? if you havent got a copy then save the whole website from internet explorer and break it down using a website editor.. or threaten legal action if they start being eggy with you..whats your host so i can steer clear of them too?

Answer 2

First off, it depends on your contract - and some of the biggest ISP's in the UK have rather shady clauses...
As trading standards once said to me:
"What! What? They can't decide to opt out of that..."

There's also direct stances from a legal point of view whether you are a home use, a business or "they (the ISP) decide you are a business"

First off,copy your files to you harddrive and back it up to CD/DVD - you should have done this anyway.

Secondly find a better ISP (not s easy as it sound - LOT's of cowboys out there).

Now it starts to get messy:
Have you got a monthly contract, or an annual one?
Are you behind with payments?

If you just have a monthly contract, no problem, for an annual you can guarantee they will use legal muscle to continue to extract payments for the full terms (whether they are in the right or not).

Either way there's no reason you can't upload the site elsewhere, repoint the IP settings for the new nameserver and carry on*

* (unless you have paid them to help develop the site, in which case there's all sorts of copyright issues you need a lawyer to go over it).

It is rather a common problem, try Googlings the name of your ISP along with words like "downtime" "incompetence" or less polite terms.

*cough*
"Downtime Pipex" "Downtime Webfusion" Downtime HostEurope"

If you are an existing (ISP) customer and are experiencing repeated problem with service levels, support and downtime for your web site(s) I strongly urge you to report them to Trading Standards and to the BBC's Watchdog. If enough of us make an issue, perhaps their directors will take notice - if only because the shareholders kick up a fuss rather than (in my opinion) any genuine care of consideration for their faceless client base.


Also look into:

The Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977
The Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982.
The Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 .

Answer 3

Work out if you are talking about the domain name or the web hosting. No one can force you to point a domain name at their server - UNLESS they hold the domain name as well. If they are holding the domain, you need to get it transferred to your preferred name server, for which the current company may have a transfer charge. If you didn't check this out when you joined you may have a problem.
Once you have the domain on a new nameserver, start up a better hosting service and just point the nameserver to it.

Answer 4

Firstly, if it is a paid for hosting, and they host the domain, then you might have to take legal action if you cant get them to respond to your emails.
If the domain is involved, contact someone like ICANN to try and resolve this.
If it is a free host, you probably dont have a leg to stand on. If you dont have FTP access or any other way of accessing your files, save each page as HTML, then you can upload to a new host.
You dont say what they are doing to you or wether they are holding your site to ransom though.

Answer 5

Copy the pages of your web site down to your computer.

Choose a new hosting service. They will be able to switch the domain name for you. (You own it, not the old host, so you can move it without their permission or cooperation).

Upload the saved files to the new web site. Unless you are using scripts, add-ons or plug-in specfic to the old host, you should be in business.

Answer 6

If you still have access to the hosting company, just download all of your website files and then upload them to a new place. If you used a site builder, then you probably will have to re-create it.

Answer 7

Yeah you are able to circulate the whole subject actual. in case you have a database purely export the tables and such. Then import right into a sparkling database on your new host. get carry of all your folder, then upload them to the recent host. in case you employ links which comprise your previous host address in them, exchange them, while you're protecting a similar area , it is going to no longer be a topic whilst moving on your new host. purely shop each and every of the archives and folders precisely how they are. while you're utilising Hypertext Preprocessor archives or something alike, you will would desire to alter internet site paths in them. in case you have a diff database call, you will would desire to alter the variables for it in what ever archives require it.

Answer 8

I am having the same problem with my hosting company so if you do find out please let me know. My website is still with them although I stopped paying them three months ago