Being a web hosting supplier can be a very difficult business especially when you give up on free trials or even free hosting. Some people respect your hosting, but often people abuse the privilege and use their free account to send unsolicited bulk emails or intentionally try to breach the terms of your terms. I’m starting to think there must be some kind of madness coming out!
Our original idea when we first started was to provide free and paid hosting, I’m sure many of you had the same ideas. But as soon as word got around to “free Hosting trial” our servers started filling up really fast with total spam and it must have been a spammer’s paradise! I can only imagine what would have happened if we had let them continue!
So where did we go from here? We stopped providing free accounts, but we gave the honorable few years free hosting. All other spammers and violators of the terms are immediately expelled from our servers. These people really can’t understand that we have equipment monitoring them and we also manually check their websites. But in general the bad guys do no favors from us, they know who they are and I really hope they read this!
So we decided to give one month free trial! To let people test our services for free to see if they like it before paying any money, do you think this worked? You may have guessed correctly, no, it didn’t work out and yes all the spammers are back, along with their buddies this time! very funny
So now we have stopped giving free trials except for a very small 30MB demo account that we configured and it will only last for 1 month. It’s a shame honest people suffer, but it seems to be the only way likely to stop spammers and TOC hackers while still letting honest people try our services for free!
Why do they think they can get away with opening free demo accounts and using them for illegal activities? Well, first of all they think they are very smart! Here’s one I came across yesterday and you’re going to laugh about it!
I suspended someone’s account for providing false information on their billing account, the address they put was in Berlin, Germany, and their IP address was in the USA, when they contacted us through live support, he said he’s from Kosovo, then while chatting With our live support he openly admitted to our representative (while chatting with her and giving her his ‘real’ email account details lol) that he was actually in Albania!!!
It turns out he opened 3 accounts with us, he gives us the same street address but he changed house numbers like :- 1, 2 and 3. Now how smart is that? About 5 watts in terms of light bulb. Now you might laugh like we did, but this guy told our live support assistant he was a very ‘bright’ guy…lol (yes about 5w)