Modern society today dictates measured responses on the web, yet a story which is more reminiscent of earlier time, when the web was wild and ruled by hormone driven 14 year olds, appears to be unfolding. Starting publicly on twitter before spreading to reddit, which provoked more responses on twitter, and then the ThisWebHost company blog... and now us!

By reading between the lines of the reddit post, one is able to deduce that thiswebhost suspended a client for a paypal dispute. (no surprise as most hosts would react similarly). When a friend of this client, (who was also a client of thiswebhost) questioned the action in a private direct message to the company twitter feed, he was told to mind his own business. Then the 'incident' escalated.

Quoting from the reddit post:

What followed was the most unbelievable thing I've ever seen a company do. He said it had nothing to do with unprofessionalism - and then suspended my account, that of my friend's, and I got an email saying I could ask for backups if I wanted, but that all of my sites were now down.

Then it got nastier!

When the 'friend' articulated his response to the suspension in a colorful manner, his data and back-ups were deleted by thiswebhost. Then the story on reddit appeared.

HostJury made an inquiry using the contact page of thiswebhost and got an interesting response:

I have no interest in providing any comments to HostJury, given your incredibly poor history of deleting our reviews and claiming they were written by the same person. You have a personal issue/vendetta against us, and I'm quite sure you'll use this story to further that.

Thiswebhost has since published a company blog post reacting to the story: (editing for brevity only)

“I'm sure you may have heard about it by now, and if not you soon will” Jules states. He continues that he is taking the opportunity to post their side of the story. Jules goes on to thank the “tens of people who felt the need to email us death threats and general profanity... we have reported them to your ip abuse departments”

Jules explanation of the events appears to factually align with the reddit account but does deviate on the point that initiated the account closure, claiming the clients stated they would be canceling their accounts. Jules then continued:

“that after more 'pushing and baiting' on Twitter, that these users also have decided to attack thiswebhost for reasons unknown, and the decision was made to end the business relationship.” (A.K.A..suspend the account.)

Jules further states that in response to a tweet that they were looking for a new webhost, @thiswebhost tweeted “Best of luck with your new host”. Jules also does admits that it could have been, and likely was interpreted as a taunt or goad. Tweeted back to @thiswebhost “go add your own expletive yourself”.

ThisWebHost terminated the account and back-ups immediately. Jules then explains how the former clients violated thiswebhost Acceptable Use Policy.... after they were no longer clients.

In fairness, the blog post by Jules does seem to admit in great detail that the situation could have been handled better. Jules may have just been having a bad day. Regardless, it has certainly been a bad day for a couple of former clients of thiswebhost