Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Reseller Hosting : AIT resellers beware of domain 404 poaching

[Mischa]

AIT is redirecting the 404 page not found error message to their Tybit ad page. It will even list the main domain name as being available. They will not notify you they are doing this and will benefit from poaching your domain name. It seems to be happening to Linux servers.

Even though this is theft of services it is kind of funny because Clarence Biggs the CEO of AIT made a big deal about click fraud with other search engine ads and then turns around and defrauds his customers out of their domain name income.

I plan on finding a new ISP very quickly.

[Hostership]

Hm.. you have a hosting account with AIT? If so, do you have custom error pages active? If so, make them, they over-ride default ones...


If I've got that wrong, then why are they doing this, surely it's illegal for them to be doing that?

[Mischa]

They have changed the conf files recently and have inserted a redirect link. All of my virtuals go to the same page. It even lists my main domain as being available for registration.

This was a light use server but AIT has grown to be too much of a problem for even for that. The server is running at 10% or more down time and it feels like they have oversold their servers. Latency is a problem and ping times run to four figures a lot.

I am moving domains off right now and will cancel as soon as possible.

[Hostership]

Just cancel and get out of there then. Maybe transfer your domains to somewhere like Godaddy or Namecheap, then get hosting, say from the same place (Godaddy or Namecheap).

[iHubNet-Matt]

Did you check their TOS to see if they specify this feature somewhere?

[Mischa]

There is nothing in their TOS or any other policy stating that they will do this. I printed and took screen shots of all their policies in case they decide to add a clause.

I had already started to move domains off their server for other reasons like extremely poor performance. They have a lot of resource hogs and do nothing about it. Before moving one of the domains I clicked on a link to see if it was still active and a tybit page popped up. I tried typing in more invalid addresses on the remaining domains and they all went to the same tybit page. It even listed my main domain as available.

This does seem like it should be illegal, but what is funny is all of the press releases Briggs put out talking about click fraud with all of the other search engines. Wonder what his reasoning will be for doing click fraud himself.

[PremiumHost]

Redirecting 404 page to a parking page is not really click fraud.
However they have no right to redirect customer's website 404 page for their own benefits.
You can log a complaint with the ads provider if you want.

[Mischa]

They are the ad provider. They own Tybit who places the ads. It is fraud when they are claiming 43 million page views. No telling how many of those came from 404 redirects instead of through a search using Tybit. It also completely takes a visitor from the website to Tybit.

Tybits home page claims it is 100% click fraud free.

What gets me is that the Tybit page said my domain was available. That makes people think your domain is not active. Not only do they steal a visitor they make them think your domain is dead.

[JBdive]

I just started having redirects to tybit.com on 404's and I WILL NOT have anything to do with any company associated or owned by AITcom. The services provided by them were horrible and I certainly won't help them generate revenue by some sort of domain redirects to advertiser sites. I also have issues with any redirect that isn't telling me it's a redirect and that redirect goes to a site which no company information, no contact information, no nothing to show you who your are dealing with.

As to the service provided let me just say during the recent round of DNS updates AIT had a major outage that took multiple sites that I know of down for a week and lost a weeks worth of business email. They made no offer to try and recover the lost email, refund for downtime or fully explain why their update to DNS caused this problem. Let me be clear here AIT admitted they did an update, they admitted they broke the websites yet a week later those sites and email servers were still down and AIT acted as if it was of no concern to them. Not to get on a total rant about them but I also have contacted them concerning a domain name hijack which they have refused to correct no matter what documentation has been provided and in fact told me on the phone when I mentioned ICANN, "go ahead and contact ICANN, see if we care or it makes us make any changes."

Looks like I need to add a new Firewall blocking rule for all our managed networks.