Account deleted by Aplus.net with no warning

So I tried to access my site today and it was unavailable. I spoke with support and they tell me that the server is fine, the actual problem was that they deleted my hosting account and all e-mail accounts. But they were kind enough to send a notice of this after the fact to an e-mail account they just deleted.

The reason being because I used to many SQL queries, which is a valid reason. But no prior notice was given (plus they still wont tell me how many is too many). They told me a warning was sent to me in December... which I never received. After a long conversation they agreed to put my site and e-mail accounts back as long as I used no SQL connections. This makes my site useless, but at least I can tell my users what's up. But this process will take up to 24 hours.

I just signed up with a PowerVPS account, but looks like that can take up to 48 hours to activate.


On a side note, does anyone know of some free software I can send a mass e-mail out with? I have a list of users who have logged in this year and I want to send them an e-mail to say whats up. It can be a PHP script or a program, whatever, as long as it takes a long list of e-mails and hides the from other users.

 

I'd just put a folder page up explaining the issues and wait to move. No use in emailing them about this.

 

I would, but the site is still down and they told me it could take up to 24 hours to get backup.

Also as a little background people use my site to store their bookmarks, therefore have a lot of trust in me that I wont just disappear overnight with all their links. So I want them to know what's going on.

 

The easiest way to do it is to send the email to yourself and bcc a big chunk of your users. That will hide the addresses from everyone and you should be in good shape.

Alternatively, there's EZMLM/EZMLM-IDX if you have a qmail installation, but it's not that easy of an install considering you are just doing a one time email.

Otherwise you could just write a simple script to iterate through emails in a text file and send each message individually, but you'd really be better off just e-mailing yourself and BCC'ing everyone. Then you won't have to worry about message formatting and message headers and learn stuff about e-mail that you really don't want to learn. It's a simple enough task that I bet you'll have trouble finding a freeware php or perl script.

 

Ya, your probably right. Can you BCC like 500 people at a time? I've never tried.

*edit* PowerVPS just gave me a call, I sent them an e-mail asking if they could set me up a little quicker and they just told me they can have me up in 1/2 hour. Which is good news.

 

Yeah, cause they know everyone that reads this will think they are schmucks!

 

If you still need to send out a mass email... I have mass emailing software... I've never used it before... but it says it will do what you want...

 

Thanks for the offer. But I already sent it out as BCC's
My site is up and running on the new host now, just waiting for the domain to propogate.

 

For future reference, or for others who may require it, try http://www.ymlp.com/free.html - my guess us a lot of those 500 BCCs will bounce back.

 

That look pretty useful minstrel. Thanks I'll bookmark it for "next time" *knocks on wood*

My old host finally let me put up a page explaining what happened. Well my domain still propagates.... slowest propagation ever.