Does a hosting company have the right to pull down my sites without notice?

Question

I have three sites with a hosting company since 2002. The last site was built by them and I agreed to pay for it instalmentally. For some reason best known to them, two of the sites was pull down without notifying me. It was a friend who drew my attention to it.

I phoned and left messages, there was no reply. I left messages on their site contact page, still no response. After about 3 -4 weeks without hearing anything from them, I finally stopped the payment on the 2 accounts. Almost 4 months after that, I was then asked why I have not been paying for the accounts. I explained to them the reason.

To my astonishment, they almost immediately switch the 2 sites back on and claimed that the sites have always been on from their side. As such they do not know what exactly went wrong.

I explained to them that they have already done the damage, as such I will prefer the 2 sites to be redirected to another server. It was then they told me I have to pay £35 each for the sites to be redirected.

They have now sent a threatening letter to say that they will close all the account if I do not pay the outstanding amount of £350.00 within the next 7 days.

I have already inform them that I want them to continue to host one account that the payment is up to date.

Kindly advise me what I need to do. Do they have the right to do this despite the fact that the payment on the third account is up to date?

Answer 1

Read the fine print on your contract.

Also... send them a very direct letter that is certified and notarized explaining your position and that you feel that you kept your end of the contract. Explain to them that you wish to remain a customer but if they persist, you will seek legal counsel to recover lost damages due to the web site being down for months.  You also will need to make a decision to use another hosting service if they choose to continue their course of action.

If you have a friend who is a lawyer, ask them to check the letter and your contract.  

Answer 2

You need to check the small print in your contract with them and if you have no glory there you probably should invest in some legal advice.

Answer 3

Have a look at their 'fine print' or service and conditions or whatever. If everything there is written down in the fine print, then they are allowed to do that. I personally would stop having my site hosted there and go to a new host.

Answer 4

This may not have been something the hosting company actually did.  It could have been a DNS issue, where their servers were not reporting the names under their IP addresses properly, or they were a victim of DNS poisoning (an attack where a hacker tries to feed bad data for name requests before the legitimate server can respond).

But, if you read the Terms and Services Agreement completely, there is always a statement that says that they CAN pull a site at any time without notice for anything they feel violates their Terms of Service.  They do, after all, own the servers.