Hosting company stole my website, and my domain name – what should I do?
whoapi.com
whoapi.com
1. Always register your domain name with a company other than your hosting provider. Don't even allow the domain registrar to be owned by the same corporation.
2. Always maintain a complete, separate copy of the website's content. Never allow the only copy of a Website to be in the hands of an ISP.
If the above two steps had been taken, the story told in the article would have been impossible, and the client could have told the ISP to go to hell and moved on to another provider.
In the above 100 words, I explain everything you need to know to protect yourself from unscrupulous Website providers. By contrast, in the linked article's 900 words, there is not one useful piece of advice, just a long, incoherent narrative about how unfair life is.
"Don't put all your eggs in one basket."
The more control you give one entity over anything at all related to your livelihood, the more likely that something going wrong (through malice, ignorance, or just "bad luck") with that one entity is going to have catastrophic circumstances.
This article wasn't about advanced user such as yourself, you don't need protection and advice how to avoid this. And my writting style is passionate, I am telling a story, not providing bullet points on advice like - Here's 10 advice you should follow so you don't get screwed over by a hoster. It was about a friend of mine who is an artist and got screwed over, and now she will go around tell people how techies are bad guys.
Yes, and we can see from your article where that got her, and what she needed to know -- solutions not in your article.
> This article wasn't about advanced user such as yourself, you don't need protection and advice how to avoid this.
Yes, that was my point -- because your article is meant for the average nontechnical ISP client, it should have included the two pieces of advice I gave. And my points could be phrased in a way that would be comprehensible even by a liberal arts graduate .. I think. :)
> And my writting style is passionate, I am telling a story, not providing bullet points ...
But if the points I made had been known to the victim, no passionate recital would be required. Therefore I think they should have been included.
> It was about a friend of mine who is an artist and got screwed over, and now she will go around tell people how techies are bad guys.
Please try to understand that your article only generates heat, not light. The remedy for the problems it describes requires far fewer words than a rant about the consequences of not knowing a few simple principles. And remember this is Hacker News, not a tabloid -- people come here for the light, not the heat.