In my previous post, I turned on EMAIL services with my hosting provider we called CoinOpHosting and send out a mass EMAIL about my change of EMAIL address. I was starting to get responses until the next day I am unable to get my EMAIL as well as unable to log into my services management console account on CoinOpHosting.
Like many of the low cost hosting providers out there, CoinOpHosting support is only available via EMAIL or a web portal ticket system – they have no phone or live support. So I opened up a support ticket on their web portal and reluctantly used my work address as an alternate to contact me. I included my cell number just in case a human did choose to call me back.
Within two hours I received a response via EMAIL. In the EMAIL CoinOpHosting informed me my mass EMAIL was considered spam according to their acceptable use policy. I immediately responded stating if you read the EMAIL I was sending out it wasn’t spam and I was simply updating my contacts with my new EMAIL address.
Twelve hours later I get a response from CoinOpHosting
We received abuse reports from our datacenter, it means your email were not legitimate. We have a zero tolerance against SPAM activity.
With a little digging I find out CoinOpHosting doesn’t own infrastructure and the “reports from our datacenter” were from their provider. Within two hours I get another EMAIL. Apparently a human did a second pass of my EMAIL and what was sent and added
If the recipient has NOT requested the email we do NOT accept the outgoing email, does not matter the content,. Mailing lists must be true opt-in mailing lists. In addition, you MUST provide at least one way to opt out and opt-out requests must be honored immediately, your email had no opt-out. We have zero tolerance against not authorized outgoing spam AND not authorized EMAIL.
At this point I realized I was not going to win and already signed up with Rackspace to be my EMAIL provider. Since my name services were with TopRegistrar I just changed my mail records (MX) to point to Rackspace instead of CoinOpHosting and since the change was within the best practice three day default mail bounce limit, I would lose little if any EMAIL.
I responded to CoinOpHosting thanking them for past service and asked them to terminate my account immediately since I did not agree with their policy as it applied to my use. CoinOpHosting was kind enough to respond and make an archive of my web site available for me to retrieve if I needed it.
My priority was EMAIL services so the only casualty at this point was my blog and I did not want to be too hasty in my next choice of hosting provider. In fact, I went with two hosting providers with different business models on a “try before you buy” basis. One provider I wanted to be sure had a human I could call for support, and the other provider just simple virtual machine hosting focused around developers. More about the experience in a future post but the technically savvy will be able to figure out what provider this blog is hosted with.
For what it’s worth,
– Joe
Epilogue: When I first drafted this post it was a bit of a rant but as I re-refined and re-read the post prior to publishing I came to terms with what happened and the outcome. In short, I got what I was paying for in a hosting market that is thin on margins and short on service-levels. I used CoinOpHosting for simple hosting service for years. Any issues I had were resolved in a reasonable timeframe given the SLA I was paying for (no SLA.) When I started using the EMAIL services I did not read the corresponding EULA. If I read it I would have known what I was going to send was considered SPAM by the provider.