How will you act towards collateral block?

My story with Yahoo hosting

[Yangtze]

I am not sure which cell died in my brain, I decided to use Yahoo hosting.

After I change DNS etc for three days, my site is still not accessable across my country.

I used online server tracking tools, it shows the site is fine. I contacted Yahoo, they told me the site is fine, and per my request, they emailed me the home page content.

Around four or five days later, the site is still showing "page not found".

I tried to ping the IP of my website at my my computure, it shows time out error.

Then I emailed Yahoo, they told me that it was blocked in China -- but not because it contains any banned content. But instead it's what they called a collateral block -- because the site is hosted on a Yahoo! Geocities server. I suddenly come in to aware that this maybe ture.B ecause you can never access Geocities webpages in China.

I asked Yahoo to refund, because most of my clients are from China. It is ridiculous that even myself can't see my websites here.

They told me per terms and conditions I agreed, the hosting fees are not refundable. They ask me to resolve the problem by myself.

I emailed them for a refund again, they replied that they had already explained the situation and were unable to help me any further.

It is only $20USD, I am not going to cry for them to refund. I would like to know how you would act if you are in my situation?

(Ps.Yahoo's hosting support phone is NOT 24/7 at all.)

[edited by: tedster at 1:26 am (utc) on Jan. 5, 2006]
[edit reason] paraphrase email [/edit]

[wheel]

It sure sounds like Yahoo! is actually serving the site, just like you paid them for - but it's getting blocked outside of them. It's not Yahoo!'s fault that your government is blocking your site.

[Yangtze]

I would recommend those who have potential buyers from China not to use a banned host.

[lgn1]

Maybe you could contact the authorities in China, and get a hole punched for your site, for the government firewall.

I suspect this is a long shot, as my understanding is that the China's Government has not learned the concept of 'good customer service' :)

Did you pay by Credit Card (Do they have these in China) or Paypal. You can always go for a chargeback, since they did not provide a service, or explain that their service would not work in China, which they should have explained very clearly on their website.

[kaled]

Yahoo is clearly in the wrong since they chose to host your site on an IP address that they new to be blocked. However, don't waste time on this problem - move the site to another host.

Kaled.