No answer from support

Our messages to support (Karl, I believe) stay without answer for more than a week without any explanation. Is this kind of situation is normal for DH or we just being ignored? It's kind of disturbing...

Can someone suggest more effective way to receive reply from DH?

First, check in your Panel for Support History. If it still looks like nothing has happened in a week, submit a new support ticket. It's rare to be ignored for more than a few days.

-Scott

In reply to:
Our messages to support (Karl, I believe) stay without answer for more than a week without any explanation.

Are you sure that it is "support" you are/need to be dealing with? IIRC, "Karl" works in DH Abuse, not support, and it is *not* particularly "unusual" for those situations to take longer for a response than the traditional "suppport" mechanism.

In fact, there are posts from DH staff on these forums to that effect:

"We are not part of DreamHost technical support - we're our own 'team', and only a handful of the tasks that we handle are shared between us and TS. While we also endeavor to get back to people in a timely fashion, odds are pretty good that we won't do it as quickly as TS will. Also, due to the nature of what we do, we generally do not provide call-backs (our policy is to have a written record of all correspondence)."

--rlparker

I think Karl is listed as both support & abuse, but if someone is dealing directly with him for some reason... I'd guess abuse.

If that's not the case, then you'll get fast replies by just going through the panel, rather than trying to contact a specific member of the support staff.

Well yes, it looks more like Abuse Team (our site was shut down for suspicion in copyrights violation). But a whole week (actually 8 days now from first message) is more than enough time for ANY kind of answer isn't it? And before that we always receive replies in reasonable time.

If you were looking for access to files, I'd guess that it won't happen.

They might not even reply, if it's a decision that's final and not open for discussion. In any case, it's not likely to be high on their priority list.

If they were to cancel my account, I think I'd just learn from it and move on.

Maybe they're backlogged? I think we're backlogged here in the forums with two open shutdown threads already...

If you're asking for either leniency or access to your files, I recommend being patient because the quick, short answer is supposed to be "no".

Before you get mad, remember that we sympathize with you in your awkward situation but want to make sure you get good advice, stay calm, and try to get the best outcome for yourself.

Yes, we trying to take back some backups of our site. I see it's really common story here... We're explained our thoughts to Karl about situation and were as much polite as possible. We didn't think about ourselves as criminals and find DH actions toward us some kind of... overreacted.

And no, we cannot just turn around and leave. We don't have any backups of our two websites that were shut down (well yes, it's partly our own fault as well, but we have trusted in DH reliability). So now we're risking to loose all results of hard work of two sites' staff for about a five years. As you can guess, every day in this "no answer" story is like another nail right in the heart of lot of people. But we're still calm, doctor, you don't have to worry...

Anyway thanks for your help. We will be patient and wait some more.

> Maybe they're backlogged?

Where did the number of open support requests go from the support request form, which became a process?

In reply to:
Yes, we trying to take back some backups of our site. I see it's really common story here... We didn't think about ourselves as criminals and find DH actions toward us some kind of... overreacted.

It's obviously a bad situation to find yourself in, but it might be helpful to understand that, if the "files" in question involve possible copyright violations, it might well be illegal for DreamHost to "distribute" them *back* to you.

I won't comment on the "rightness" or "wrongness" of any of that; copyright law in the United States, and much of the rest of the world has long been an issue where reasonable people disagree about what is "right" and what is "wrong".

Considering how clear DreamHost's TOS are about such things, it is a little surprising to me that people regularly find themselves in this problem. smile

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yes, it's partly our own fault as well, but we have trusted in DH reliability).

It really doesn't sound to me that this issue has anything at all to do with "DH reliability". They didn't "loose" your files, they *removed* them from their servers, and those are two very different situations.

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So now we're risking to loose all results of hard work of two sites' staff for about a five years.

As I have not seen your site, and do not have any personal knowledge of what was involved, I can't really comment on that other than to say that it is always important to have your own backups of *anything* you place on a machine you do not own. Additionally, *if* copyright violations were involved, you loss of benefit from " all results of hard work of two sites' staff for about a five years" is probably to be expected; it could be worse, as you could be being sued and/or prosecuted in addition to merely loosing access to those files.

At any rate, good luck in your attempts to resolve the situation.

--rlparker

>> It's obviously a bad situation to find yourself in, but it might be helpful to understand that, if the "files" in question involve possible copyright violations, it might well be illegal for DreamHost to "distribute" them *back* to you.

Of course we understand that. All files in question were on specific sub-domain (it had open access for different users and we believe someone may use it for illegal stuff, but we cannot even investigate it now because it's blocked) and we suggest to DH just leave it closed as they please. We trying to take back only two forums backups and content of two websites (just html and graphics, no any files that may be suspicious in any kind). In worst case even just a backups of forums will be a great deal to us. We can't see any reason for not giving back this kind of staff. It's legal by default isn't it?

>> Considering how clear DreamHost's TOS are about such things, it is a little surprising to me that people regularly find themselves in this problem.

Please show me that part of TOS claim about not giving back our content back? We don't try to re-open our account or take back our money (we'd lost full year pre-payment by the way). We just need our content back because is't our intellectual property. That's all.

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We trying to take back only two forums backups and content of two websites (just html and graphics, no any files that may be suspicious in any kind). ...We can't see any reason for not giving back this kind of staff. It's legal by default isn't it?

I understand better now, and I would agree with you that there is most likely no reason not to provide those files (though it is probably not a high priority of DH at this point). The data in your forums is most likely "legal", though it is not necessarily so "by default"; forum posts *can* contain illegal information (though I suspect this is not the issue in your case).

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Please show me that part of TOS claim about not giving back our content back?

Actually, that was not what I was referring to; I was talking more about the immediate closing of an account for copyright violation (and I doubt you need a reference to that!).

Generally speaking, for me, it is a given that I have a copy of anything I put on someone else's computer. It's *nice* if I can get a copy of it from them at any time, but I never rely on it. A regular backup policy would make all of *that* partt of the discussion moot. wink

--rlparker