Month: April 2002

Spent a few hours last night getting excited about the new Star Wars film. All started when I noticed a display in the supermarket for Lays chips with photos of 3CPO on the bags. (Already with the marketing, sheesh.) Went to the Official Site and watched the four medium sized trailers for the film. You can’t watch the large size ones unless you upgrade to Quicktime Pro. I wonder if that helped Apple, or hurt them. The Ifilm site has a countdown clock to the Episode II release date on a page full of fan fiction films. I watched 3 or four of them too. “American Jedi” is worth a click, American Pie meets teenaged Obi Wan Kenobi….

Nothing yet from the OR Attorney General….

Someone invited me to join the web_hosting_troubles group at Yahoo, lots of other THC Screwees there. I signed up, and even posted a reply there. Boy howdy is that a pain in the butt to use. Not literally use, but finding your way around through all the ads, sheeesh.

Add that to Mike McBride’s Forum on this subject and I now have officially too many places to post and not enough time to do any of them justice.

Now that I’ve said it again, I don’t particularly care for THC Screwee as a label, but at least it rhymes. 😀 Anybody else got an idea? We need a logo , maybe a slogan…shirts, mugs, mousepads 😉

Here is the gist of the form I submitted a few minutes ago to the Oregon Attorney General:

To: consumer.hotline@state.or.us
From: nobody@216.78.141.121
Cc:
Subject: CONSUMER COMPLAINT FORM
X-mail-agent: mailmerge v1.1

CONSUMER COMPLAINT FORM
Date —- 4/23/2002
_______________________________

DATE OF TRANSACTION(S) —- 13-Sep-01
_______________________

INFORMATION ABOUT THE BUSINESS OR PERSON
ABOUT WHICH YOU ARE COMPLAINING.
Jack Thomas DBA That Hosting Company
320 SW Stark St Suite 205
Portland, OR 97204
BUSINESS PHONE NUMBER
(503) 223-5323
____________________________________
DATE OF TRANSACTION —- 13-Sep-01
HOW MUCH MONEY DO YOU THINK YOU LOST? —- $99
WHOM HAVE YOU CONTACTED CONCERNING YOUR COMPLAINT?
ATTORNEY —-
BUSINESS—-
OTHER—-
NAME OF CONTACT —-
NO ACTION —-
___________________________________

DETAILS OF THE COMPLAINT
DETAILS —- I signed up for lifetime web hosting with That Hosting Company in September and they never provided a reliable service. Their site advertised 100% up time for 2001 and in the 3 month’s I was using their service there were several outages lasting from 12 hours up to 3 days. 2002 was even worse. The last of which started on 9-Apr-02 and continues up until now. Every time there was an outage they was no explanation. Recently after an outage they sent an email that they were merging with another host to provide us with better service and to expect several outages for the 5 days it would take. 8 days later they were up again but not providing the same type of service. Didn’t matter as connectivity was slooooow and brief, after a week they were down again.
__________________________________________

John Newman answered my call for a copy of the THC Terms Of Service. He snagged them using the Wayback Machine. Good thinking!

Another THC screwee, Jon Mcguire passed along a link to the BBB of Oregon & Western WA’s online page about THC. They have a different address and phone number listed:
4130 SW 117th Ave #451
Beaverton, OR 97005
503-223-1837

My rapidly failing gray matter made me forget to do the Oregon Attorney General’s online complaint form I mentioned yesterday, I’ll do it after I post this and let you know what I get back.

I’m back and it appears that if you search for “that hosting company” on google this blog shows up as the 3rd item on the second page. Because of that 4 people have written to me to ask if I have any knowledge on THC. Two of them this weekend alone. I guess everyone out there are getting anxious as it has been 12 Freaking Days since any of our sites have been online.

So here is what I know. Nobody is at home at THC. Their site is down. I tried the phone number (503-223-5323) that used to be listed for them when you did a Who Is request and the friendly recorded voice informs me that, “The number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer in service.”

Go to www.register.com and enter your domain name in the box and click “Check it” When the next page shows up, click on the “Taken” link. Ignore the shameless make an offer crap and go to where it says “To access the WHOIS information for this domain name, click here.” and click.

If on the next page you see your name listed as Registrant, you are one lucky SOB. Kiss your $$$ to THC goodbye and find another web host. I have had positive experiences so far with http://webaxxs.net/index.html YMMV. Under that is the listing for Registrar, contact them and move your site to your new home.

If you are like me it says that the Jack Thomas is the Registrant 🙁 and GoDaddy is the Registar. The only thing I know to do is complain to GoDaddy, others have and if enough of us do too maybe we can regain control of our domain names. I submitted a sad tale to them on their support page here. Will post here what response I get.

Another source of info is a web hosting forum from a THC escapee.