Thu 23 Feb 2006
For the last year or so I have recorded and posted sermons for our church, Danube International Church. Soon after I began working with the web hosting service provider that hosted this site, www.ValueHost.co.uk, I noticed suspicious irregularities. Russian language tech support messages were the first clue.
Several months later our site suddenly crashed. After more emails (coming from Russia) with their tech support we learned their server had crashed and all our files were lost. Fortunately we had backups, so we reposted the site’s files and were going again in a couple days.
At the time I decided our church needed to find a new hosting provider, and I began to expect an ugly fight from them to release our domain name, danubechurch.org. They registered this name for us as part of their service, but that also meant that we did not have exclusive control over the name.
Tom jumped into the game recently since he will be recording sermons after we move to Orlando this summer. He set up a new hosting service account at Blue Host and went to arrange the transfer of our domain to them. This is where the trouble began in earnest.
ValueHost.co.uk never responded to any of our emails. To this day, they have never responded to any of our emails or phone calls. Yet their email server sends us a renewal notice every day telling us our account is about to expire. In frustration we contacted the Internet registration service they used, BulkRegister.com, and we initiated legal action to free our domain name. ValueHost.co.uk didn’t respond to this either!
We are still in the middle of the process to transfer our domain, but now there is a cute Russian message on the danubechurch.org site.
?????? ??????? ???????????
?????????? ? ?????? ?????????.
Translation: Don’t use ValueHost.co.uk. If you do, this will happen to you! You have been warned.
February 23rd, 2006 at 6:53 pm
Sounds like a real challenge!! Hope that you soon get it resolved.
I’m trying to figure out how I can get another person to take care of our Prayer Ministry Website while we are away in April. Haven’t been able to figure that out. Can’t help but feel it isn’t as much a problem as you are having!
Seriously, I trust you will soon have this solved and moving on.
I was talking with our Minister of Admnistration and Missions, Russ Ewing, last evening and was telling him about your ministry on the web – He wanted to know when you would be back in STL and, af course, I told him “you were going international” with your ministry through CCC. I also told him I would get you two together via email, etc. I think you are right! The next Billy Graham will be a geek! What a way to get the gospel out!!!
Blessings to you and your family.
Carl
February 23rd, 2006 at 8:25 pm
have tom give bluehost a call. their service guys are awesome and they may be able to do something – especially if you are new customer.
March 6th, 2006 at 12:52 am
I had the same issue with Valuehost, but domain registrar was joker.com
Fortunately domain was registered to my old email address at hotmail, so I was able to renew that email account and transfer domain name to another registrar.
ALWAYS buy domain names and hosting separately!
Valuehost originally is Russian company founded by Peter Zaritov with headquarter in St.Peterburg (all sites not depending on language are part of the same system, so many messages are in Russian). It also has very bad reputation in Russia, however was the largest hosting provider there, because was the first in offering affordable hosting plans and had good quality several years ago.