Recently an individual associated with the domain “xthosts.com” decided to rip a copy of our design and make it available for public download.  While they haven’t realistically done anything that anybody with basic skills couldn’t do if they spent some time doing it, they did make our copyrighted intellectual property illegally available to others in a fashion which proliferates the illegal use of our design.

We knew it was only a matter of time before we would have to go on the offensive to protect our intellectual property, and that time has passed.  The “provider” going by the name “Coomme” is using an illegal copy of our design and, as such, is violating international copyright laws.  What scares me the most about this, isn’t the fact that they could damage our reputation and corporate image, but that if they couldn’t take the time to come up with their own design and they did such a horrible job of editing in their own logos, what kind of service can their “customers” expect?

I can only hope that anybody looking into potentially signing up with “Coomme Hosting” can come across this post and realize that the provider they were considering is knowingly using stolen property.

Here is a current view of MDDHosting.com and Coomee.com as of this writing.  Click on the images for full size.

If you look closely at the logo and the arrow that begins with “Secure & reliable hosting” you will see the obvious marks from the design being edited.  It sickens me to know that there are individuals who will steal so blatantly.

Update 08/11/2011 – 1:27 PM EDT

It seems that they think that simply changing some of the colors, but yet still stealing the design itself makes the site “legal”… Seriously… GET YOUR OWN DESIGN.

Update 08/11/2011 – 6:47 PM EDT

The logo has changed, although it’s still using our rounded parallelogram and dashed lines, they’ve also changed the background on the comparison boxes and the colors of the “Order Now” and “Learn More” buttons.  There is still a lot of our copyrighted material in use, but who knows, maybe by the time they’re done butchering this illegal copy of our intellectual property it won’t be recognizable?

Comcast Bill showing $50 "Unbilled Activity"

Let me first begin by saying that I’ve had Comcast Internet and Television service for well over 4 years and for the most part I’ve been satisfied with the service itself.  I’ve rarely had to use customer service as generally I’ve not had issues with any of my services and when I did for the most part Comcast fixed those issues in a timely fashion.  I’m not entirely sure what has changed over the last year or so, but things have gone seriously down hill when it comes to customer service.  I’m going to do my absolute best to detail exactly what happened, how it happened, and why it happened so that you can hopefully make an informed decision as to whether you wish to go with Comcast, to continue your existing Comcast service, or to shift to/choose another provider.

On September 27th, 2010 my wife and I moved in to our new apartment a couple of minutes away from our old apartment and we had previously called to schedule Comcast to come out and perform a transfer of service to get our DVR Box and our Cable box online in our new apartment.  Comcast came out and performed the transfer of service free of charge and since we were moving into a larger apartment we opted to go ahead and get another digital box for one of our bedrooms while we were at it.  The technician that came out explained to me that this was his first installation where he was on his own and apologized ahead of time if it took longer than we expected.  I told the technician that I understood and that it wasn’t an issue.

The technician did what he needed to do including making the connection in the junction box at the back of the apartment building, cutting and putting ends on coaxial cables for our DVR, Cable Modem, and Digital Box, and installing a splitter for the DVR and Cable box.  The technician tested the line for the DVR and the cable modem and everything seemed to be working well so he went into the bedroom for the new digital box.  The digital box was having some issues and displaying an error code so he powered the box off and back on and it appeared to work fine so he finished up his paperwork and left.

About a week went by before we had a chance to use the cable box in the bedroom and when we turned on the TV it was giving the same error code it did at the original installation prompting me to call Comcast and have them come out to take a look at the box.  A technician came out the next week and at first glance he said that the cable box was dead and went ahead and swapped it out for a brand new box and told me that the issue would be resolved.  I tested the box myself and was pleased to see that the box was indeed working as it should.  The technician finished his paperwork and left and everything was fine for about a week.

The next week I began seeing 20% to 30% packet loss on my internet connection and I ran numerous tests to Google.com as well as several other sites and servers around the United States and abroad to ensure that it wasn’t something specific to a particular site, switch, router, or network outside of Comcast’s control.  I directly connected the modem to the computer and tested to ensure that it wasn’t the router and I switched out ethernet cables as well to ensure it wasn’t a bad cable however the issue continued.  At this point I determined that something was wrong and it wasn’t my equipment so I called and scheduled for a technician to come out and look into the issue.

The earliest the technician could come out was around four days later which was less than satisfactory as my livelihood requires an internet connection and I had to resort to a cellular 3G connection in the meantime.  Finally once the technician came out he hooked up his tester and made sure that our cables and ends in the wall were in good shape and he informed me that they were and that there didn’t appear to be any issues between the junction box and the wall plate in the wall.  He then proceeded to look over the coaxial cables that the original installer put in place and found that the original installer had failed to properly put the ends on the coaxial cables.  He was rather shocked to see this issue as he said it was a very simple thing to fix and very odd for it to be overlooked when putting ends onto a coaxial cable.  If my memory serves me correctly he said that the original installer neglected to put a seal on the connector, or something similar.

The technician fixed the cable, the one that the original installer brought and installed, and I ran my tests and the packet loss was gone and the signal to the modem was once again excellent.  Everything has been absolutely wonderful from that point until today, when I went to pay my Comcast bill.  I saw that my Comcast bill had $50 in “Unbilled Activity” which you can see by clicking on the thumbnail of the bill at the top of this post.  I had no idea what these charges were for so I called Comcast’s customer service to discuss the charges.

I was connected with a customer service representative who explained that the $50 charge was for the technician to come out to repair the service, and that the issue was with our equipment and not theirs.  The representative even went so far as to say that the installer had replaced a “line drop connector” however when I asked her what a “line drop connector” was she said that she didn’t know and that I would have to get in contact with a technician.  I told the representative that this was unacceptable and that there was no way that I am going to pay a charge for something if they can’t even tell me what the charge was.  I had the call escalated to a supervisor as the customer support representative couldn’t adequately explain the charge.

I was connected with a supervisor and she explained to me that it was to replace a connector in the face plate on the wall which didn’t happen and yes, they’re charging me $50 for a $0.50 connector.  I told the supervisor what the technician did when he came out, that he said it was indeed an installation error, and that it was a simple fix and that the technician told me that I would not be charged for the visit.  The supervisor said that it was a legitimate charge and that there was nothing that she could do about it.  At this point I was becoming extremely frustrated and I asked to be escalated to the next level supervisor at which point the individual told me that management did not take phone calls and that there was essentially nothing more that I could do.

I asked the supervisor to transfer me to another supervisor hoping that I would get a hold of somebody with a real sense of customer service and would at the very least get me to somebody who could resolve the issue, or advise me on how to further pursue the issue to get it resolved in a timely fashion.  The next supervisor that I spoke with on the phone simply told me that it was against company policy to escalate a phone call any further and that all they could do was escalate it on their end, but didn’t explain to me what that entailed or what to expect.  The supervisor even went so far as to actually say that he agreed with me that in this particular case this was an extreme lack of quality customer service but he told me that there was literally nothing more that he could do to help me.

Essentially it comes down to the fact that the original installer that was contracted by Comcast to install my service in the new apartment failed to do so correctly and I’m now being billed for the incompetence of the original installer.  When contacting Comcast customer service I’m being told that the technician that fixed the issue put a code down that caused me to be billed and since it was a legitimate code that there is nothing that they can do to waive the charge.  If Comcast doesn’t in some way, shape, or form let me know that they really do appreciate me as a customer and tell me that they are going to make this situation right, at the least, I’m going to look into alternate providers for my services.

My business is growing at a decent pace and I’m looking at opening a physical office location for my employees to work out of which would have been a Comcast Business connection in addition to the data and TV connections that I currently have in my apartment but at this point it looks as though Comcast is going to be potentially losing out on my future business as well as my current business.  I sincerely hope that Comcast hasn’t grown so large that they don’t care about their individual customers and don’t care if they’re unhappy, receive poor customer service, or simply choose to no longer do business with Comcast due to these reasons.

Comcast: make this right, or I’m going to do my absolute best in every way, shape, and form to make sure that anybody I ever have any interactions with be it business, personal, or otherwise knows exactly about your services, the lack of customer service, and everything that these issues entail.  The ball is in your court, I hope you make the right decision.

The client was warned via private message and their warn level on the forum was increased and then they decided to make another reply yet again re-iterating their original post and going far enough to make a public threat against us on our forums.  We at this point disabled the client’s forum account and opened an abuse support ticket with them which you will find below.  The client’s identifying information has been removed as our privacy policy protects the client’s identity and personal information but the contents of the ticket itself is not personal.

MDDHosting – Abuse on Forums

Ticket ID: [Redacted]
Department: Abuse
Creation Date: 09/26/2010 20:28
Last Reply: 09/26/2010 22:47
Status: Closed
Priority: Medium

First and foremost I would like to say that I am very disappointed in your lack of self control in our community forums. We generally do our best to avoid having to moderate any posts as we like to keep things open and honest however we will not allow you to be intentionally derogatory towards us, our clients, or our services without just cause.

One thing you should keep in mind is that your account and services are on the ***Echo*** server and as such are not affected whatsoever by the issues we’re facing with the Fresco server. We’ve disabled your posting abilities on the forums for 30 days and your posts are set for moderator preview for 60 days. Please use your short vacation from the forums to think about how you have conducted yourself, and how you should have conducted yourself.

Thank you,

Michael Denney
MDDHosting – Professional Hosting
http://www.mddhosting.com/
Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/MDDHosting

I will be expecting a full apology and complete reversal of these actions
and then I might not switch to another host.

[Redacted Client Name]

I’ll be more than happy to apply a credit of $26.50 to your account however I will not apologize for reprimanding you on your conduct in our forums. If you wish to shift hosting providers, by all means do so.

Thank you,

Michael Denney
MDDHosting – Professional Hosting
http://www.mddhosting.com/
Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/MDDHosting

Thank you,

Michael Denney
MDDHosting – Professional Hosting
http://www.mddhosting.com/
Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/MDDHosting

Thank you,

Michael Denney
MDDHosting – Professional Hosting
http://www.mddhosting.com/
Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/MDDHosting

I understand you are displeased with our service this month. I also understand that you have been a client for 17 months without issues.

Ultimately, it comes down to an old saying: “When it rains, it pours.” Both the zero-day exploit on echo and the DDoS attack on fresco are situations that are out of our control. We do our best to remedy them as fast as possible while protecting your sites, customers and data.

Our TOS entitles you to a one month credit on your account for time lost due to the echo problem. This credit has already been added to your account and will be applied to future invoices.

As for the fresco DDoS attack, we have already made changes to mitigate the attack, and at this moment, the server is responding normally. We do not anticipate any downtime because of this attack. In fact, other than a few users in europe reporting slower than normal FTP connections, nobody reported any downtime or issues.

Regarding the forums: we hate to have to moderate our forums. It’s our policy to keep things 100% open and honest wherever possible, but we do need everyone to remain professional when replying to announcement threads. Clients, such as yourself, go there for important announcements about the status of their service. Off topic and unrelated conversation makes it difficult to effectively communicate what is happening. If you ever have an issue with a moderator decision, please open a support ticket and we will discuss it with you.

As I said earlier: when it rain’s, it pours. If you feel that a zero-day exploit, plus less than an hour of slightly slower than normal FTP connections truly negates 17 months of exceptional service and support, then we wish you good luck with your next provider.

If you understand that some things are out of our control, and that we do our best to mitigate them, protect you and your clients, and maintain great uptime whenever possible, then you are welcome to stick around and take advantage of the credit on your account. The choice is yours.

Thank you,

Scott S.
MDDHosting – Professional Hosting
http://www.mddhosting.com/
Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/MDDHosting

I wouldn’t exactly say I have not had any issues either. I did have to
contact your company support desk several times where sites just disappeared
which turned out to be a problem with the Lightning server not displaying
pages due to a permission error. Which was never explained as to why the
failure happened since permissions were never changed. Again I am a patient
man and I was able to research the problem and fix it and provide your
company with the details for future clients that had similar experiences.

Having server issues from time to time can be overlooked, but failure to
respect customers can’t.

[Redacted Client Name]

> Then someone made the mistake of treating me as if you were my customer and
> trying to tell me how I need to behave.
It’s our forums, not yours, and as such we will enforce the rules and guidelines on those forums as we see fit. If you disagree with the way that we choose to run our forums, you’re welcome to abstain from using them. Nobody is forcing you to post on the forums.

> I really could care less about a DDoS attack I knew that it would be handled
> easily I have done seen people douse those in the past.
This particular attack, yes – but not all attacks are equal. We always do our best to keep things online because to be honest that’s the business that we’re in. We’re not in the business of having sites offline.

> What does however create a problem is when I have someone that I am paying
> $503 a year treating me as if I am some kid
> and trying to admonish me over the slightest comment they choose to take
> offense.
We simply warned you that you needed to watch your attitude on the forums, if you took offense to that then there isn’t much that we can do about that. If you want to have a forum where you can make negative posts towards MDDHosting.com, by all means do start your own forum.

> I was nice enough to say I would settle for an apology and forget about it.
It’s like I said, we’re not going to apologize for reprimanding you on the forum. You can either move on with your life, or you can allow this to upset you when there is really no reason to be upset. I won’t go so far as to call you childish however I do personally feel it would be a tad childish to “throw a fit” over a forum reprimand.

> If he chooses to behave in this manner and be so thin skinned and childish I
> have no alternative but make sure I spend not another penny with your firm.
> There is a line a mile long these days of hosts that would love to have the
> $503 for the next however many years they can keep the doors open.
It’s not about the money – to be honest whether you paid us $1/year or $1,000/year the fact still stands that you would have been reprimanded on the forums and that I still would not apologize for doing so. You need to conduct yourself in a professional manner on our community forums. Using the forums is a privilege and *not* a right and as such we can suspend those privileges at any time. We’ve temporarily disabled your forum account for 30 days to give you some time to think about your actions on the forums.

> I wouldn’t exactly say I have not had any issues either. I did have to
> contact your company support desk several times where sites just disappeared
> which turned out to be a problem with the Lightning server not displaying
> pages due to a permission error. Which was never explained as to why the
> failure happened since permissions were never changed. Again I am a patient
> man and I was able to research the problem and fix it and provide your
> company with the details for future clients that had similar experiences.
I do believe the issue was explained however if you’d like to give me a ticket number I can look it over and tell you exactly why it happened.

> Having server issues from time to time can be overlooked, but failure to
> respect customers can’t.
In no way have we disrespected you – you were out of line on our forums and you were warned… You then took it a step further on the forum after having previously been warned and your forum account was disabled. Warning you on the forum and disabling your forum account is in no way disrespectful and is fully within our rights as the operators of the forums.

Thank you,

Michael Denney
MDDHosting – Professional Hosting
http://www.mddhosting.com/
Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/MDDHosting

I’m closing this ticket.

Thank you,

Michael Denney
MDDHosting – Professional Hosting
http://www.mddhosting.com/
Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/MDDHosting

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://test-cpanel.com/.*$      [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://test-cpanel.com$      [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.test-cpanel.com/.*$      [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.test-cpanel.com$      [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC]

It actually checks for the line “RewriteEngine on” and does not add it a second time into the .htaccess which is smart… The problem comes when you remove hotlink protection.

cPanel goes through all domains, subdomains, add-on domains once again this time and removes the code but it removes all instances of “RewriteEngine On” in every .htaccess. The problem that comes with this is that if you’re running something such as WordPress, vBulletin, IPB, or any other script that uses mod_rewrite, as most do, suddenly all of your rewrite rules no longer work.

I contacted cPanel about this issue and the technician confirmed that this was a bug and this is what I got back:

I responded back asking a simple curious question:

Their response (same technician):

Now don’t get me wrong … I fully understand why a large organization would take such a stance on issues with their software, but that doesn’t stop me from disagreeing with this stance.

Being fairly irritated with this issue (and others in the past) that I have reported and seen it take 6+ months to resolve I responded with this:

The tech did go ahead and pass my message on to management:

I won’t be holding my breath.

Point of the story: be careful with “Hotlink Protection.”

Jonathan Burdon

I have written a pretty in-depth review of Jonathan Burdon and AlreadyHosting.com concerning their affiliate fraud campaigns here. I even discovered that Jonathan Burdon is directly using cookie stuffing to obtain fraudulent affiliate commissions.  You can watch a short video demonstrating the cookie stuffing for MDDHosting, BlueHost, HostMonster, and WebHostingPad in this video.  If you’re not very familiar with how affiliate systems work, the basic premise is that sites will use outbound links to the provider that place a cookie on the user’s computer to identify the referral so that the affiliate can be paid.

In an article about Jonathan Burdon [which is likely written by Jonathan] it is claimed that “There is one *unnamed* company on the web that refuses to pay Jonathan for his contract so they have launched a smear campaign against him, please ignore their comments,” and the article goes on to say “If users will take a few moments to visit Jonathan’s sites they will soon realize that his site is a great resource and that the individuals writing the slanderous posts about him are simply incorrect.” Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/branding-articles/jonathan-burdon-webmaster-2848333.html

It seems that Jonathan Burdon believes that I’m personally launching a smear campaign about him and goes so far as to claim my posts are slanderous.  What I find particularly interesting, is that I have only posted verifiable, factual information and even the email communications with Jonathan Burdon.  I’ve not posted or said anything that wasn’t simply true and verifiable.  To be entirely honest, I don’t care about Jonathan Burdon or his reputation but only that he doesn’t continue committing affiliate fraud and, as such, stealing money from other hosting providers.  I publicly challenge Jonathan Burdon to disprove any of the information I’ve posted about him or AlreadyHosting.com.

I’ll be straight and to the point as to why Jonathan Burdon (AlreadyHosting.com) has not been paid for their affiliate commissions – they’ve committed affiliate fraud and, as such, we terminated them as an affiliate.  In performing cookie stuffing, not only has Jonathan’s site immediately taken credit for everybody who visited his page whether the page was helpful or not in the provider obtaining said new customer but it has done so under the false pretenses of being a “Review” of which the page was most certainly not.  Any provider that relies upon word of mouth and quality reviews to obtain customers will have a large portion of their customers who simply search Google for reviews of their company.  As soon as one of our potential customers clicks on the AlreadyHosting.com link to read the review of MDDHosting they will already be giving AlreadyHosting.com credit for the purchase even if the visitor was only on the page for a tenth of a second and didn’t find any useful information.

Jonathan Burdon has submitted a DMCA Takedown Notice to us and our data center to have his email conversation removed from public view under the false pretense of his emails being “original works” that he claims are protected by U.S. Copyright Laws.  While I do very much appreciate Copyright laws and their protection of intellectual property; I do believe publishing of Jonathan Burdon’s emails qualify under “fair use” and, as such, as soon as the DMCA Takedown period has passed (10 to 14 days) said emails will be published here once again along with some more emails not yet published.

It is my own personal opinion that the only one being damaging to Jonathan Burdon’s reputation is Jonathan Burdon.

Here are some more sources of interesting information:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=963915

http://www.scottswezey.com/blog/2010/jonathan-burdon-wants-to-sue-you-if-you-link-to-someone-that-doesnt-like-him/

Update – 07/24/2010

Upon further research it does appear that Mr. Burdon is indeed correct about emails and copyright and as such the emails that were previously posted and removed due to his DMCA notification will not be reposted.

The individual signed up using a first name and last initial only, their mailing address was a mail forwarding address, and many other red flags were sent up when this individual attempted to order services.

Here is a complete view of the email conversation with all personally identifying information redacted and by all means read it over and let me know what you think in the comments.

This individual came to us from WebHostingTalk.com so I’m curious how they are going to portray this email conversation.  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what they have to say.