
Aabaco, the web hosting company, has been facing a class action lawsuit from a customer claiming Aabaco took down his website and charged him for the hosting services. You may have heard the news about a customer of Yahoo’s small business company Aabaco suing over his web hosting service in the Northern California District Court. The plaintiff, Ronald Meyer, owns a photography website that had been shut down due to hosting issues. Meyer claims having his website shut down has directly effected his business, hence the lawsuit.
What is Aabaco?
Shortly after purchasing the web hosting company GeoCities, Yahoo started providing web hosting services and domain name purchasing. Through the company Viaweb, Yahoo also provided eCommerce applications. In 2015, Yahoo’s product line was renamed Luminate. Later that year, Yahoo decided they wanted to change the name of Luminate to Aabaco. Aabaco has since received lots of criticism, as customers say that the products and services are unreliable, with frequent issues.
Case Details
The plaintiff’s name is Ronald Meyer, not in any association with Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo. Meyer had purchased Yahoo’s small business web hosting service in 1998, for $9.95 per month. Yahoo served the website, while providing additional admin email accounts. Meyer, as a children’s book author, had multiple sites for his books. He would use his admin email from his separate photography website to communicate and sell to the children’s book customers.
Meyer’s Claims Against Aabaco
Meyer claims that he was still paying for the web hosting services while his website was down. He also claims that his site was abruptly shut down with no notice. According to Meyer, this caused major issues for his business, as he cannot sell any books if the sites are no longer active. His customers allegedly had no avenue to reach his business email account. As a result, Meyer says he contacted support. He claims to have had interactions with support on multiple occasions. Unfortunately, none of the support staff were able to assist Meyer with reactivating his websites. He says he also asked to cancel his account with Yahoo’s Aabaco company. In return, there allegedly were no productive actions taken place, and Meyer found that he was further charged for Aabaco’s services. Following the multiple interactions with support, and further being billed for the services, Meyer decided to solve the issue in court.
Meyer believes that he is not alone, and will be representing any other Aabeco customers who are claiming to have issues with the services provided. Two types of complaints that customers face, that are directly related to Meyers issue include:
- Websites are abruptly shut down without notice.
- Customers cannot cancel the account with Aabaco company.
Meyer is seeking compensation for damages and “declaratory relieve”. Yahoo is being charged on multiple accounts. It has allegedly violated:
- California’s False Advertising Law
- Unfair Competition Law
- Breaching Contract
- Breaching Implied Covenant of Good Faith and Fair Dealing
- Breaching Unjust Enrichment
The class action complaint was filed on Friday, April 14th. Meyer will be representing himself in this case along with the others that have had the issues listed above. As the class action complaint states, the suit will exceed $5 million.
This is not good news for both Aabaco and Yahoo, as it could ruin the reputation of the Aabaco company. It would also put the integrity of Yahoo on the line. The web hosting space has many competitors; it is not easy for any company to compete in. As stated before, the company has changed its name along with other business tactics in the past. It will be interesting to see the results of this lawsuit. It is also a question of how badly this will affect Aabaco, and if there will be any other changes made with the company as a result.
Avoiding Web Hosting Issues
It is critical to have a website for your business, as much as having a good host for your website. Do research before committing to a web host. Read some online reviews of the company to discover what the web host is really like. There are so many web hosting services to choose from, that you can guarantee that you will find one that suits your needs. The mistake of choosing the wrong web hosting service could lose customers along with money as stated above. Therefore, Web Hosting Sun provides information on how to choose the right web host for your business or personal website. Be sure to check out: How Do I know If a Web Host is Reliable?
I own g0pg. xyz and this site used a modified version of YOURLS php script that prevented users and the admin from logins also I modified the script so that all the artwork was hosted offsite. The freehosting. com website has prevented me from getting my php script and database info; it’s a list of shortened websites. They similarly did not notify me of their intent to shut down my website and I attempted to seek administrative remedy but they refuse to restore my hosting or give me my data. Additionally, there reason for denying me service is that the website was allegedly phishing.
See this pic:
tiny. cc/websiteshutdown.
That’s sad to hear. Stuff like that usually happens when using free hosting sites. You’d be surprised, but they don’t have to notify you about their intentions. Sure, it would be respectful if they do, but that’s the thing with the host providers like that.
Refer to their terms: “Free Hosting reserves the right to remove or suspend any accounts at our discretion without reason or explanation.” or “..with or without reason may suspend and/or delete user accounts and cannot be held responsible for any financial or personal damages resulting from such suspension”.
Since we cannot see your functional website or details of the scripts used, logically we cannot make any judgements here.
Ember, I hope you have some local backups of your site. If not, you can try to reason with them, maybe they will unsuspend your account or at least allow to retrieve your files.
In any case, if you are serious about building your website, I would advise against using their free services in the future. Ember, what was the goal of your site? Were you building something serious or just testing and playing with the database and php scripts?
It happened to me… I had to pay 80 dollars to reactivate.
He should have gone to https://lazyape.com where they dont hold your domains hostage and the web hosting is separate from the domain. He would have had control over his account.