Arg! Enom and Openhost

To my huge dismay, this morning I found my site www.tankuniversal.com was redirecting to a generic page of advertising.

On getting in contact with Openhost they've replied that;
'It is with regret that we advise customers that we are experiencing a major problem with our Domain Management partner, Enom.

For as yet unknown reasons Enom have disabled our account and changed the nameservers of an as yet unknown number of .com .net and .org websites.'

https://support.webhost.co.nz/index.php?_m=news&_a=viewnews&newsid=345&group=openhost

Bloody hell! This is the week in which Meridian4 has sent out a press release about TU and this happens! Does anyone have any extra info, suggestions?

Not much you can do, from the sounds of it, other than wait...

This is why it's not the best idea to have your domain registration done by a 3rd party like your ISP/hosting company... If you have the registration under your own account, you have more control over things when they go wrong -- right now, you're entirely at the mercy of no only enom, but also OpenHost.

(For all you know, they 'forgot' to pay a bill or two)

Yes - live and learn! I'm really curious to know what's gone wrong - from the details OpenHost has given, it doesn't sound like overdue bills are the problem - but I don't really know. I would think though, that if your domain partner suddenly decides to redirect all your .com,.org and .net sites, then that's most of your hosting business knocked out!

The only other story I've heard is of a domain being disconnected by Enom at the direction of the American government due to a fraudulent website. That was a few years ago and nothing to do with Openhost though.

That is an incredibly unprofessional state of affairs on the part of whichever company is responsible. If you haven't already done so, I'd suggest you phone Enom at the number provided in the help desk message (or a contact number on their site) and find out what the story is.

It's hard to say -- I've seen Network Solutions screw things up in the past, where the magically reverted some domain registration records back to 6-month prior versions -- re-pointing the DNS servers to IP addresses that didn't exist anymore and we had migrated away from.

It could very well be Enom bungling things up the same way... It's just extemely unfortunate that they appear to be closed for business over the weekend...

...And I'm sure that if you read the small print, it'll be a case of "Too bad, have a nice day" with no recourse...

I might do that soon.

You have no idea how distressing it is to go to my site only to be redirected to a page of crap advertising links. And to make matters worse, my sales rate had started picking up after a good mini-review from gametunnel.com!

Bloody hell! Grr! Arghh!

By the way, in case you're interested: It looks like you're site is back up right now, I'm able to view it.

Still doesn't work here... Seems to redirect to an advertisment site for some blitz game ;)

Very droll ;-)

xlsior - just got your email - didn't twig who you were so ignore my confused response ;-)

Just got an email from Openhost saying that their account's been reactivated but they don't know why. Sounds like someone screwed up badly at Enom.

I'm glad things are coming right but I'm very unhappy that it happened at all.

Site doesn't work for me. Might just be DNS changes still propagating, though.

That's what xlsior suggested (email). Hmm, he hails from Washington and Enom are based in WA as well. I wonder if he knows something?

Not really... I used to work for an ISP so I've had to deal with Enom in the past, but other than that I have no 'insider info' or anything.

Site's up for me now. I'll have to give the game a tryout. Those screenshots look interesting :-)

Bill

Great! Let me know how it goes.

If anyone's interested, Openhost have released a press statement regarding the outage;
https://support.webhost.co.nz/index.php?_m=news&_a=viewnews&newsid=347&group=openhost

'As for the cause of the outage Enom has revealed it was over a disputed payment of US$300 from March that was charged to the former owner of Openhost, who sold the business to Williams in 2007.

Williams says he is appalled at the actions taken by Enom's billing department. "Openhost has been an Enom customer for 3 years, and made payments in the tens of thousands of dollars over that time without question. To have over 700 business websites turned off over a matter of $300 without contacting us or checking our credit history is beyond belief."'

So some bean counter made an 'executive decision' thousands of miles away on a weekend and my site's down for two days with out warning nor recourse. I hope Enom get some heat over this (if it's all that Openhost have said it is).

All that agravation to users (and really, really bad PR) over $300 bucks! That's just ridiculous. Remind me never to have anything to do with Enom.

From their press release:

Kind of makes you wonder how much money Enom made by serving ads on the 700 domains they hijacked...

If as Enom (nom nom nom nom) says their terms and conditions state they will turn off accounts without warning upon any bill dispute then.....

a) they are buggers

b) so are openhost to agree to such restrictive T&C

Sounds like Enom could do with some re-working of their account managment though, they may not have staff to look at every account that goes overdue, but perhaps they could spare a couple of people to look after the larger accounts.....

Or just an eutomated email, "if you don't pay in x in y days we will cut you off"

Perhaps the real culprit here is the former owner of Openhost.

Enom might have been sending account demands to the former owner and he ignored them and kept quiet about it. Enom then cut off the current owners of Openhost.

Just a theory though.