After six weeks without blogging, I am now back at it. Blogs will continue to be a bit irregular over the next month or two.
As some of you undoubtedly noticed, AFANA.com was off-line for about 32 hours beginning late Thursday night into Saturday. On Wednesday evening, without warning, our site was taken off line by our hosting company. We then spent the next day and a half trying to get the situation resolved. Not a fun way to spend a holiday.
Our hosting company in turn buys it's service from another company and I will not name either company here. It's alleged that the higher service provider received a complaint from AOL that we had sent sp*m to an AOL user. Nothing could be further from the truth. We're meticulous here about avoiding any possible interpretation that any of the mail we send out is unsolicited e-mail. We drop any repeated bounces from our lists and we honor all unsubscribe requests promptly without complaint. If you haven't asked for it by subscribing or joining AFANA you don't get anything from our e-mailing lists. We hate unsolicited e-mail at AFANA and we get hundreds of such messages a day.
When we finally, after some 16 hours, got a copy of the header of the supposed $pam message it was immediately apparent (and would have been to anyone with minimal skills at reading headers) that it didn't originate from us and had nothing to do with us. In fact, three of our own AFANA users received the same s&am. I then contacted AOL and surprise! surprise! they have NO complaints lodged against us and haven't blocked mail from AFANA. So, wherever the complaint came from, it wasn't AOL. The AOL ISP desk categorically denies making such a complaint.
Our site was restored to service after another 15 hours of waiting. How much did this cost us? We will probably never know for sure. What we do know is that many visitors were likely befuddled by the "site suspended" message they received if they tried to visit our site and we surely lost some potential new members. This also likely impacted our ranking on Google. Are we glad to be back online? You betcha.
Moral of the story: in today's online world, you are guilty until proven innocent. If your hosting company or their provider wants to make your life difficult with (or more importantly without) justification, they can do so and your recourse is probably limited to the courts. Good luck. Where else can your company be put out of business without due process of law?
We were planning to move our site to a new host in December anyway. Now that move will take place even quicker than originally planned. As a result there might well be a brief interruption of service sometime in the next week or so. Additionally, after the move, it will take us a few days to test and make sure the site is working properly. So, if you have any problems please call or e-mail us so we can get right on to the issues.
Another issue is the future of TV coverage. We're hopeful that we will have some news on that front very soon. I remain confident that footy will be somewhere on US and Canadian TV in 2004. Expect much more information here and a TV newsletter in a few weeks after we relocate our site to a new host.
-Rob (who did finally get some sleep last night...)