Live from Austin!

[For more cases of LiveJournal Abuse Team behaving abusively, check out http://ljabuse.blogspot.com/.]

For several years I was a paying user of LiveJournal. Now I pay for web hosting and run my own content management system. It’s not by choice; this is the story.

In a nutshell, following an altercation with a racist troll, LiveJournal suspended my account without warning, even though I had not breached their Terms Of Service. They didn’t suspend the troll’s account–instead, they announced that (contrary to their written terms of service) racist comments were in fact perfectly acceptable on LiveJournal.

Attempts at compromise to resolve the issue were ignored and rejected, even when I offered to delete offending comments. The money I had paid for the service they were refusing to provide was not refunded.

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Well, it appears I’ve landed myself in the middle of an Internet fraud. The web hosting provider I was using, which vanished overnight, is supposedly one of the numerous web hosts set up by someone known as “Shang”… and also known as Josuee Shang, Joe Shang, Joe Sheikron, Josuee Ortiz, Joe Guadalupe and Joshua Shang Ortiz.

It gets weirder. His step-father is apparently named Daniel Milk, and is a VP at Compaq who managed to lend his son a bunch of Compaq machines to start his hobby web hosting business with.

Yes, his son. “Shang” is apparently a teenage kid. Reports of his precise age vary, but the mode is 19 years, with a range of 15 to 21.

The person “Shang” listed as the head of finance for his companies is a Ms Milk, which means she’s probably his mother… but her full name was on the domain records as Guadalupe Milk, so perhaps it’s just another alias.

Whoever “Shang” is, he lives in Porter, TX, just outside Houston, close enough to Compaq that at least the bit about his dad seems credible. His recent companies include Tacidhost.com, tacidhost.net, eryxma.com, and tacidblue.com.

The interesting thing is that while lots of people claim to have been fraudulently billed, I’ve checked my credit cards online and he hasn’t attempted to defraud me at all. The services were provided and worked fine right up until the implosion. And sure, I’m out a few months of really cheap hosting, but companies go bust all the time. That’s one of the reasons why the “bargain” 100 year domain registrations from Network Solutions are worth avoiding. (Even more worth avoiding than anything else involving Network Solutions, that is.)

So for a second time, I’m watching an online tempest of allegations and counter-allegations swirling around, with insufficient verified information to let me reach any kind of firm conclusion. However, as this entry will no doubt soon shoot to the top of Google, I will take the opportunity to say that anyone reading this should probably be wary of doing business with any web hosting company with a name starting with “tacid”…

Mean time, my web site is back, sorta, at a company which is based in… Porter, TX. Hmm.

My web hosting provider exploded. The company who supposedly bought their customer lists has failed to get things going after a week or two. So, I need a new web host.

Requirements:

• Linux or UNIX based
• SSH access and rsync for uploading my site
• Low monthly fees
• No price gouging for extra bandwidth
• Low or zero setup fee
• One domain, at least 3 subdomains
• At least 2 POP3/IMAP mailboxes
• A reasonable amount of space (50 MB or more)
• SpamAssassin

Nice-to-have features:

• Usenet/NNTP access and server
• Jabber server
• Logs and stats
• Search engine support for sites

I don’t need PHP, JSP, ASP, SSI, SQL, CGI, … Just static web pages, cheap. Also:

• I don’t need DNS hosting or domain registration, just the servers to point my existing domain at and a working MX or two.
• High uptime isn’t all that important; the odd day or so of downtime is fine.
• Phone support isn’t important.
• Technical hand-holding won’t be needed, obviously.

I’ve found:

• WebIntellects (attraction: unmetered bandwidth)
• DreamHost (attraction: Samba, WebDAV, streaming QuickTime)
• 123CheapHosting (attraction: cheap)
• Micfo.com (generous allocations yet cheap)

Frankly, I’d be tempted to do it myself if we weren’t planning on moving in the near future…

My web site’s down again. I’ve checked the logs and found out why: another 68,000 people downloaded my screensaver this month alone. That means well over 100,000 have downloaded it since I released it.

I just can’t afford to keep paying for that kind of bandwidth unless I make the thing shareware, so I’ve submitted it to info-mac, and I’ll be removing it from my web site temporarily. Please feel free to pass copies to friends or put up mirror copies while I wait for info-mac to do their stuff.