HOSTING SCAMS
Online, the phrase “exit scam” is now being mentioned in several places [1, 2, 3]. Many believe the company behind all these VPS providers is running away with the money it made in Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, without providing any service.
Paranoia and fear of a scam are high, and for good reasons. As several users have pointed out, the VPS providers don’t list physical addresses, don’t list proper business registration information, and have no references to their ownership. Effectively, they look like ghost companies.
In the last 48 hours we have become aware of the shocking news that around 20 web hosting providers, mainly VPS providers, are shutting down with just a few days notice for their clients. To be very clear from the start, we, SharkHosting, are NOT affected by this.
The latest news suggests that something called “DeadPooling” is taking place. DeadPooling is when a person or company sets themselves up to provide very low cost hosting for a few months and then, disappear with no chance of a refund for the customer. Strange! Haven’t we just had Black Friday & Cyber Monday deals? Planned? You decide.
Anyway, at least 20 web hosting providers have hastily notified customers that they plan to shut down, giving their clients just two days to download data from their accounts before servers are shut down and wiped clean.