Hi everyone, I currently have a hosting account with omniearn.com. I am not sure if anyone would have heard of them as they are an Australian company.

I first used them a few years ago when a friend of mine was hosted through them (I was using my friend's space). When my friend didn't pay they deleted his account. (fair enough) so I started an account with them.

Everything worked fine. My main purpose for the site was to host a gallery of my images. Just my graphic life journey. Nothing special...

In march this year I decided to stop being so slack and get my gallery working again. (After going through the likes of coppermine, which I really didnt like).

I downloaded a gallery script that gave me a reasonable amount of control but didn't need any PHP knowledge to use. I went to install it, but it did not work. I was just given a mountain of errors. I just thought silly me, I have done something wrong. So I asked around to try and find out the problem - with not much luck. I then emailed omniearn.com hoping maybe they knew what the problem was (I thought GD wasn't installed (i didnt realise this was part of PHP at the time)). To begin with they were helpfull...

Once I realised I was not getting anywhere - I signed up for a few free hosts to test the script on. I used about 5. I think out of 5 - 4 of them let the script run. (Most of them didnt have GD or ImageMagick so I could not get thumbnails - but otherwise it worked perfectly.)

I then contacted omniearn again with my discovery. I received no reply. The last I heard from them was April 20th. I have emailed them every couple of weeks since - and have had no response. Last week I decided enough is enough - and contacted the office of fair trading. They got in touch with omniearn for me, and I got a response today saying omniearn would be contacting me. Here is what omniearn said:

Alecia,

We are aware that Ryan installed ImageMagick for you and was doing quite a few customisations for you, ImageMagick can pose security risks and as such this server has been attacked several times, as you sohuld understand we cannot provide programming assistance given current monthly fee levels and all our current scans and tests show the server itself to be working correctly.

We are fully aware that it is your wish to transfer hosting providers to a provider which you know you will not have any hassles with your script and we will do everything we can to make the transition go as smoothly as possible.

When you decide to transfer please let us know where you would like any refunds owed deposited so we can arrange this also.

Omniearn Support
support@omniearn.com



Note: I knew nothing about ImageMagick being installed, nor was it even what I needed or enquired about. I informed them of what I had found and how I believed it was not the script (I managed to get it fully functioning on my uncle's site which is provided by his ISP).

I should also note that in an email I received on April 17 said:
"Sorry to have seemingly ignored you, i've taken over a small computer store in Tasmania and the flood of email i received sort of blew all my work for April all over the place."


Now my question to you all:
Do you think I am completely within my rights to request a full refund? I have been unable to use my website as I would like to for at least four months. They claim that the price I am paying doesn't justify them fixing the problem... But the way I see it - they offer PHP - it worked fine for about 3 years and suddenly it's gone. When i purchased it PHP was functioning. Therefore it is now not functioning as they had described - so I should be entitled to a full refund. And also theres the 24/7 support. Which I obviously found is not 24/7 support.



This may be more of a rant/warning against omniearn. And looking back now I should have thought more about what they said when they deleted my friend's account. They said there was no way to recover the files of mine they deleted. (Which included about 6 months of photos. - my computer had been formatted a couple of days beforehand due to a virus and I was yet to download the files for backup.)


Yeah. I suppose thats the end of my rant. Thanks for reading