Over the past 18 hours one of my websites called CyberbullyingReport.com has been offline despite being withing bandwidth limits. I gave Shinjiru a 2 hour notice last night before going to bed that failure to put the site back online would result in a consumer fraud awareness campaign being launched against them to warn consumers that Shinjiru is actively ripping people off by purposefully failing to provider service as advertised. The failure comes in the form of promising unlimited bandwidth with 99% uptime in conjunction with so called "urgent maintenance" periods designed as cost cutting measures.

The bandwidth issue has two problems the first being that Shinjiru will suspend domains that it feels are using up too much of their resources regardless of how much bandwidth remains within limits. I know this because I bought their "Enterprise" shared hosting package which included unlimited bandwidth and I still have had domains suspended during high traffic periods. In one case I lost a site for 3 whole days including Christmas while they claimed to have a senior engineer on the case. I finally had to start posting complaints on their Facebook page to start getting responses most of which were not favorable. Today I got the following response via email when questioning them:

"It might be there is some mis-configuration that was set in your hosting account previously and that`s why your site unable to open when the bandwidth is limit"

Sound like a load of crap if you ask me. After having my domain offline for nearly a day at a time when I just want to point the DNS elsewhere which I can finally do now that the Plesk login page is finally back up and launch the site. To make matters worse I was going to start leaking the service to members of the media who have covered sites of mine in the past today, but have no site to leak to them. As a result I will be calling them tomorrow and telling them both about the site as well as the evidence I have against Shinjiru with the hopes that one of the reports will do consumer fraud story.

Then there is the issue of "urgent maintenance" that appears to happen regularly on shared hosting servers. This proves that the maintenance is not "urgent", but scheduled for the purpose of taking sites offline to save the company money. The only other possibility is that the staff is so unskilled that they don't know how configure a server while keeping it both plugged in and turned on.

To remain fair and balanced I must say that there are some good things about Shinjiru. Their private domain registration service gives you a Bahamian contact address while insuring you for up to $1, 000 of US legal fees for any issues regarding your domain name for just $15. The only drawback is that you cannot set the DNS yourself and must send in a support ticket that may take them a couple hours to answer. They also seem to have kept my database up and running through all this, so other sites of mine not hosted by them can use it. On the downside my new host couldn't restore the .bak file right away because they claim Shinjiru made inappropriate use of the 'sys' user which became an orphan user on restore.

Am I a hypocrite? I started a website aimed to combat cyberbullying both when it comes to interpersonal disputes and misuse of sites like Complaints Board yet here I am trying to force Shinjiru to put my site back online by following up on my threat to file a complaint if they failed to fix the problem. Am I now a cyberbully? I don't think so because bullies bully for the primary purpose of hurting people and I am just an angry customer demanding what I paid for. I may use similar methods, but I'm not a bully.