Hi all and welcome back to The Scratching Shed. As some of you will know the site has been down for a few days recently due to a problem with the previous hosts.

I won’t name the sites former hosts as I’ll probably get myself in to trouble, but they removed the site from their servers without any notice giving the following reasons;

Please be advised that your account has been terminated because ACCOUNT DEEMED TO BE AGAINST AUP – Admin has reviewed the activity of your account and deemed the account to be in violation of our AUP.

AUP extract: Shared Web Hosting accounts are not to be used for the purposes of distributing software and multimedia products. Multimedia Files: Multimedia files are defined as any graphics, audio, and video files. Web Hosting accounts are not to be used for the purposes of distributing and storing unusual amount of multimedia files. Any Web site whose disk space usage for storing the multimedia files exceed 70% of its total usage, either in terms of total size or number of files, will be deemed to be using unusual amount of multimedia files.

This is of course, complete nonsense. The site was – and still is – used as a blog and by no stretch of the imagination does it breach AUP as claimed above. The site had several videos posted to it, but all of these were hosted by a third-party. Usually Youtube.

I tried to resolve the situation with the hosts, but received further nonsense from them in every reply and despite numerous requests, I never got a specific explanation of my alleged breach.

I suspect the actual reason was that the cheap hosting I’d opted for couldn’t handle the demand the website was producing. On the first of August alone, I attracted close to 10,000 unique visitors, which took quite an heavy amount of bandwidth. I’d suggest that despite them claiming to allow ‘unlimited bandwidth’ they simply couldn’t handle the strain and decided to terminate my account giving some ridiculous and nonsensical reason.

Anyway, the site has now been switched to a new host, which is more expensive but I have used before and had no problems with. I guess the moral of the story is you get what you pay for.

Unfortunately, all the previous content has been lost but I’ll learn from my mistakes and aim to avoid any future occurrences.