And the story NOW is...

Poor, sad, maligned JC-Hosting. Yeah, respond to a legitimate request for data on a site you shut down with no notice, and it's someone else's fault. You poor, poor baby. If, as you said, AW was over its bandwidth limits, then charge them -- that's what a professional hosting service would do.

James makes all these rather pitiful excuses for why they pulled the site (note he's now denying that Barbara Bauer had anything to do with it, which he's contradicted in several places) and blaming those awful people at AW for making him look bad. Oh, and he's also claming that this whole problem is actually increasing his business, because his new customers know that he won't allow spammers and scam artists to shut down their site. Um, like you did for Absolute Write? Yeah, I'm believing that.

Even if there were problems -- and to be fair, there might have been. AW is a large site with a lot of activity -- even if...you deal with it professionally. You don't deny access to the site and data and you (gasp!) TALK to the offending webmaster. This whole screed sounds a bit like sour grapes and CYA for someone who made a bad decision and just can't own up to it. Far too many coincidences, if you ask me. Classifying a whole community of writers as "hacks" and insinuating that they are all annoyed "PA authors" (PA being Publish America, a huge scam publisher) is just the sort of ad-hominem attack I'd expect from someone trying to deflect blame and figure out what their story is. It's easy enough to prove one way or another -- claim that the webmaster sent you emails? Well, you still have them, don't you? (Although, to be sure, now that lawyers are involved (at least on AW's side), no one can do that. )

I definitely won't consider hosting with them, and will make sure to tell anyone asking me for advice to avoid JC-hosting.

On a lighter note -- it looks like they finally did (at midnight on the first of the month) allow the webmaster back in to download/backup the data and restoring and testing in progress. Hope it works.