Some of you may be wondering why Objects At Rest moved providers and URLs a few months ago. It happened because of a bad webhost, Canaca.com. I didn’t say anything at the time because I thought it might be a one-time thing, but I’ve since learned they play games with other customers, too.
Basically, what happened to me was a credit card expired. This sort of thing happens. Canaca was on top of it and asked me ahead of time to enter a new credit card. I did, and the charge appeared on my credit card bill, and all should have been good… right?
Well, a month later, Canaca abruptly turned off my account and all of my access to my data due to “lack of payment.” I moved hosts immediately, and began a two-month-long process of trying to cinvince Canaca that they were no longer authorized to charge my credit card. I only finally made progress when I threatenned to call Visa/Mastercard on them (I forget now which card I used).
About a month ago, Schlock Mercenary, one of my favorite web comics, moved off of Keenspace. I realized they were on Canaca by some odd DNS problems that first day, and my suspicions were confirmed. I immediately emailed the Schlock technical guy and told him of my problems, ending with the advice that I wouldn’t move just yet in his shoes, but I’d watch and see what happened. 26 days later, Canaca shut down Schlock for taking too much bandwidth. Nevermind that it was well below their bandwidth quota. They got caught within a month, so hopefully Howard will get all his money back.
But I’ve dealt with Canaca before and I wouldn’t count on it. I never did get that extra charge back.
April 30th, 2005 at 2:21 am
That’s funny - Canaca was the first of 4 web hosts I’ve used for Altering Time. It was a long time ago now, but if I remember correctly my problem was constant downtime. Too cheap to be true!
April 30th, 2005 at 10:07 am
After typing up this entry, I sent a little email to Howard and his tech guy, warning them that Canaca might try to play games with their refund.
The tech guy sent me an interesting note. As you might remember, Canaca charges in US funds. Even for Canadians. Well, it turns out, at least sometimes they issue refunds in Canadian dollars… without taking the exchange rate into account.
Howard’s moved the site to EV1, which is apparently spammer friendly. I expect he’ll end up regretting that.
It’s sad what you find when you turn over a few rocks.