Do all providers do it or is it just plusnet cut you off with NO WARNING

[#1]

Do all providers do it or is it just plusnet. I went over quota with customers looking at my website. With NO WARNING plusnet removed the site completely. I had no idea I had gone over quota. I pay over £40 per month for a business grade connection and the response I got on the phone this morning was basically TUFF. (then he hung up on me) Surely they should have at least had the courtesy of contacting me first so I could resolve the problem. Do all providers cut you off without warning or is it just plusnet. :(.

[#2]

If your website was pulled, you were not a little bit over, you were significantly over your allowance. Plusnet takes drastic action in such circumstances to prevent other users websites being affected by the extra traffic.
Have you identified what put you over? If so and you can say what plans you have for preventing the same problem occurring again you should have been able to ask for your website to be restored fairly quickly. It sounds like you got a pretty duff agent as you should have been advised to that effect.

[#3]

The removal of the site comes as a result of being over quota on your transfer. A grace is provided on this, however it does very much depend on the volume by which you go over this.
Tracking of user hits can be performed via our webstats facility, with a more realtime view from external services (though that does depend on the content causing this and viewers settings, as to how effective this will be).
I was aware of the call you made to our Support Centre yesterday regarding your issues, and I am unsure what further my colleague could do. Whilst not pretty to your side of the conversation, my colleague answered a number of questions and even advised on what would need to take place to restore the site.
The conversation was far from a "tuff" response, but he did correctly advise he could not action this over the phone and that a support ticket request was required for Acceptable Use Policy reasons (though from memory, he may not have directly told you this specifically).
We do email customers when we archive their sites, however to do so requires that a valid and operational email address exists for their account, so we can do this.
It contains full instructions on what is required in order to restore your site.
Once the support request was raised, your site was restored within 40 minutes.
I'm sorry to hear you wish to leave over this situation, however in much that same way we did not provide you with prior warning of the site removal, we did not receive prior warning that you site was going to receive a very high volume of hits.
We do try to make it clear in our advertising on what customers receive within their package, which include their webspace. Our policies do advise that content will be removed were this falls outside of this.

[#4]

You did NOT inform us in advance of removing the site.
If you had then something could have been done about it
The reason we are leaving after many years with you is your total
inability to understand the problems you cause by cutting business sites off without warning.
We have lost a lot of business because of this.
Meantime we have checked carefully other providers and in EVERY case they say they inform their customers BEFORE removing their site if there is a potential problem.
We've now moved our site to a company costing a lot less than Plusnet and offering a massive more bandwidth allowance. (30Gb compared with your 500Mb per month)
We called them to ask about useage and they told us they would NOT cut us off without warning if we went over limit but contact us to sort out the problem. This is the total OPPOSITE to plusnets policy.
In my 1st phone call to you you said in effect "we don't want websites, we only want to provide a connection to the internet".
We came to you in the first place for the 500Mb webspace. Now we are told ok fine but don't actually use it.
Reading your reply above, how are we supposed to know that lots of customers are looking at it without constantly checking results etc.
We assumed that if you are paying a business subscription you would get an appropriate business support. Obviously not in the case of plusnet.

[#5]

Quote from: MrMog

We have lost a lot of business because of this.

I am sorry but if you are looking for commercial web hosting from a company website, then you should choose a professional web hosting company. Especially if you web sit e is a source of revenue.
Not rely on free web hosting provided by your ISP!
But a guess you know that, hence why you are so "Annoyed with yourself".
Chilly

[#6]

Quote from: MrMog

You did NOT inform us in advance of removing the site. If you had then something could have been done about it

I normally defend PlusNet in most occasions, but from the feedback I am receiving from my customers that contact PlusNet, the comments that I get back is the poor communications with their customers.  I understand that you need a valid email address, but some people don't use their PlusNet email address and only use hotmail to receive their email.  Also, these people find it far too complicated to log on to the website and change it.  Maybe in these instances, PN could do something sensible like calling their customers.  I know this is time consuming, but the cost of the call would surely be overidden by the continued revenue from the customer rather than the customer having to leave PN!!

Quote from: MrMog

In my 1st phone call to you you said in effect "we don't want websites, we only want to provide a connection to the internet".

There must be someone in CSC that is saying this as my Dad has had problems with uploading websites, ftp & FrontPage issues and he has had more or less the same response.  "The website service is provided for free so what do you expect".  Hello, for Business package prices, you expect Business link:censored support.  Find this guy in CSC and fire his ass.
That's my two pence worth.  Hope PN are monitoring this and take note.
Regards
Ben Cooper
Source IT
Moderators note by James_H : Remove inappropriate language. : Please keep things 'family friendly' : link:rules

[#7]

Ben,
Mind PMing me your Dad's username?
Ultimately we won't design someones website for them, but we should be helping people who, for example, are having FTP auth errors and things like that.

[#8]

Hi Ben.
High end Business support is something we pride ourselves on and I will deal with any situation where we fail to provide this.
If you havent already provided the details to James, I'd be more than happy to investigate this and find out what took place.
PM me if you need to.

[#9]

I have provided the details to James.  Not heard much back since.

[#10]

Apologies Ben, I completely forgot to update you on the situation!
I asked Chris to test all the features of your Dad's websapce, from an FTP, Webspace and CCGI point of view, all of which tested perfectly fine.
I believe Chris also phoned your Dad to let him know and I believe that everything was resolved to his satisfaction.

[#11]

Unfortunately I didn't call as I ended up extremely busy and it slipped my mind, for that I apologise.
As James says all the aspects of the webspace including ccgi were working perfectly when I tested this last week. What are the issues being encountered and I can do some more testing from here?

[#12]

1)  When you use Internet Explorer to go to your ftp space and try to upload files, it will only allow one file at a time to be uploaded.  If you try to send more, it won't work.  This was apparent on my own ftp space as well as my Dad's.
2) When pointing domains to folders it won't work for the domain we wanted and therefore we're forced to put the items in the root htdocs folder.  All other domains works in their folders.  Does something have to be in the root before you can add folders and point other domains at them?

[#13]

Quote

1)  When you use Internet Explorer to go to your ftp space and try to upload files, it will only allow one file at a time to be uploaded.  If you try to send more, it won't work.  This was apparent on my own ftp space as well as my Dad's.

Hmm not sure why this would happen, I'll try using windows explorer (haven't got IE6 on here) and see how many files I can upload at once to my space.

Quote

2) When pointing domains to folders it won't work for the domain we wanted and therefore we're forced to put the items in the root htdocs folder.  All other domains works in their folders.  Does something have to be in the root before you can add folders and point other domains at them?

Nope, this should work. If you want to PM me the details I'll see if I can spot a problem. It's worth remembering that this will take 4+ hours to take effect due to the way DNS propagates.

[#14]

I left it overnight and it didn't work.  However, my Dad doesn't want it touched now as he it is working, he knows where it is and doesn't want it down anymore.
FTP problem is only apparent on IE not via says FireZilla.

[#15]

Quote

FTP problem is only apparent on IE not via says FireZilla.

OK, I'll get this tested somehow, I'm sure there is a machine here that has IE6 on!