Every industry has them. A bad apple. Or a bunch of bad apples. It seems, lately, that there are a lot of evil hosting companies out there that want to keep people as customers. They have decided that the best way to do this is not through personalized service, but by holding their domain name(s) hostage. They will turn their phones off, ignore email while your site and email remains down. Evil! How can you protect yourself? Make sure the domain name you paid for is registered under your name. You can check this by doing a whois search. An easy to use site is http://www.whois.sc . Put your domain name in and make sure the registrant is your name or the company name. An active and proper email address also makes it easier to switch your domain name to another provider. YES, you can switch providers. Your new provider should help with this transition. But the first battle is to make sure the domain name is owned by you.

Together we can fight the evil hosts!