Last month I was on a train in Italy when I received an incoming call from an “unknow number.”  Upon seeing that, I cringed and my stomach sank.  You see, I’d had that same “call” on two other occasions while traveling in Europe.  It was from my web hosting company back in the USA notifying my account (meaning my website and my blog) had been suspended. 

I have used the same web hosting company for over ten years, however in recent years things have made a drastic turn for the worse.  It is long story and I’ll not bother you with the details, let’s just say I learned my lesson the hard way. 

The odd thing is that I always got the “unknown caller” when I was not in a position to do anything about it, usually I was in Europe.  The person I talked never varied, it was always the same voice, although he never used the same name twice.  The story varied at each call beginning with “my website had overrun its space on the server and I need to pay more money to get unlimited space.”  The next time the same guy (using a different name) said several of my domain names had expired and as a last ditch effort I would have to pay lots of money to reinstate them.  The next call I got was because my webspace was using too much bandwidth and I should pay more money to get unlimited bandwidth.  The final call came, as I mention,  while on the train last month.  This time my “problem” was that someone “hacked” my webspace and it was “gone.”  They had a backup, but I would have to purchase new webspace and pay for someone to restore my data at a huge cost.   

That was the last straw!  I just let everything sit in limbo for a couple of weeks until I could get back home.  Luckily, I had a full backup of my website and a backup of my blog from late-March 2010.  So, over the last few weeks I’ve restored my BLOG and totally reworked my website.  Hours and hours of my time, but with a reliable and well researched web hosting company, I feel a lot better.

The moral here is NEVER trust anyone without checking them out.  When I got to digging into that web host provider, I found scores of complaints and very similar stories to mine.  Apparently, he/they have fooled a lot of people.  If you are insterested check it out on the web:

The crooks are : Global Internet Services (GISOL) http://gisol.com

My research revealed fraud at many different levels:

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/gisolcom-global-internet-solutions-c14536.html

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