GrrrGraphics back up after 12 hour “suspension” wink wink

The GrrrGraphics.com site was down for 12 hours yesterday. This is the third time this year that this has happened and this has been a the longest outage. Our hosting service claims to be there to help businesses succeed–the usual blather–but in our case they seem to be actively bent on hurting us.

We could not get a straight answer from them for 12 long hours. They dithered and stonewalled us. Finally, just before midnight, their tech people sent us an email claiming we were overusing bandwidth and hurting other customers on the server. In other words, it’s our fault because we were becoming more successful. They knew they were the ones who shut us down, but they refused to come clean and admit it. No…they’d rather see us stew in darkness for half a day.

Instead of warning us or telling us we could go to a VPN or larger server for which we would have gladly paid extra, they shut us down with the alarming message, “User Suspended.” This made us look like criminals. What would potential visitors think? Were we guilty of spreading a virus or making death threats or uploading porn? This kind of pejorative message box was unnecessary and insulting.

We also made a screen capture during the peak activity yesterday. We weren’t even close to exceeding their bandwidth. So the hosting service lied about that, too. It almost seems as if someone there is bent on silencing us.

We are now in the process of finding a new host with more bandwidth–someone reliable who will tell us the truth and be on our side instead of a host that shamelessly lies while keeping us in the dark for 12 hours. And then blames us for it.

Grrrgraphics keeps ramping up success and we’re on the verge of being able to do this full time through sales of signed prints, t-shirts and sales of original cartoons. There are many hurdles to success–dealing with a hosting service who is actively against us is jut one of those hurdles.

–THE GRRRGRAPHICS TEAM