Has DataWebPro hosting gone out of business??

I just learned yesterday that Steve Hettrick passed away last week. He was the man behind DataWebPro.

He was a brilliant mind and I will miss talking to him.

We were friendly competitors so we used to bounce ideas off each other (mostly me off him).

Anyway it comes as a real shock.

I'm having bigtime problems too. FWIW, not all their servers are down, at this time my sites on P5FOX.NET and PALACESITE.COM servers are working.

Thanks kindly for the info. Have you had any luck in getting your sites back online?

I will update all with what I know and share my communications with Steve's server providers.

I posted the following across my network earlier today:

Major issues and a lesson! My primary host DataWordPro's Steve Hetrick died unexpectedly at the end of January. Given the demands that placed on the family, they failed to notify individuals and companies hosting with them. 5 years for me SEO Plans, SSL and Dedicated Server.

When I was informed by a friend and partner on Thursday of this past week, I filed support tickets, emails and left phone messages. All without response. Gradually, over the past 48 hours I've lost access to all websites and the dedicated server.

I've since learned Steve was a reseller for Coastinc.com who appears to have been an agent or repackager for Jeff Hinkle and GNAX.com

I would appreciate any suggestions anyone may have who may have been in a similar situation previously and to warn everyone to expect the unexpected.

I can't even access the site backups because I don't know where they were being kept offsite.

May the rest of you have a great Super Bowl Weekend!
-----------------

Below is a copy of the letter I sent to Coastal Internet Solutions:

As I am sure you are aware, Steve Hetrick died at the end of January, 2011.

I have had numerous domain names hosted on multiple servers and a dedicated server for several years.

I am no longer able to access those servers to download and transfer them to another host and need your assistance in allowing me to retrieve my files and data from those servers.

WHM and cpanel access has been dying to me for the past 2 days.

The various DataWebPro sites, email and support are down.

Prior to this point none of my prior emails, support tickets, chat messages and phone messages have been responded to by the organization.

After having an agent speak with Steve's stepmother, I've confirmed that his daughter (Jocelyn L. Larson) and his sister (Tracy K. Petrosky) were to be handling the business, however, neither have responded and I need to gain access and make my transition ASAP.

I've contacted GNAX.com and they said this needed to be addressed with you.

Respectfully Frustrated,

Ron Capps, PhD

Aka Dr. Ron Capps the NicheProf
Phone: 660-928-3454
Skype: RC-Enterprises

-----------------

Copy of Coastal's response to me:

Hi Ron,

We have been in touch with someone at Dataword that is handling the business. They have informed us that they are handling the situation as is so far and the only thing you can do is try to reach them again for further answers.

Unfortunately, as you are not our customer, we can not do anything other than forward your message to them, and also suggest trying to contact them through any other methods you have (email, phone, fax, mail, etc). The phone number listed on their site is 717-254-1318

By law, we can not provide any further information as you are not our customer and we can not give you any private/personal/internal information. I do apologize but as long as someone from their company is responsive, we can not do anything else directly with you. We have extended our condolences as well as offer to help and support in any way necessary in these difficult times for them.

We will gladly keep you updated on any progress or new information that Dataword tells us to give.

In certain situations where the host is considered permanently unreachable (after a predetermined/extended period of time), we can then discuss other options with you directly. We will be in touch if this situation comes to that. But so far we have been in constant communication with them regarding this situation.

So we expect to have more information from them within the next 24-48 hours

Thank you,
Coast Internet Solutions, Inc.

---------
At this point, I hold out some hope Steve's survivors will make arrangements for all of us to at least be granted access to the servers for the purposes of transferring all data and files to another hosting option.

The reason I chose to use DataWordPro was...Steve. He was responsive, insightful and candid. Unfortunately, this experience has driven home the point to look more closely at larger hosting solutions with a deeper ecosystem in place to weather unexpected situations like this one.

Beyond the loss of Steve, the added tragedy is with each passing hour, a potential valuable asset which might have been merged or acquired by another hosting company is turning into a potential liability and devalued corporate asset.

Feel free to send me any questions I might be able to respond to and I'll make an effort to keep this thread updated as I learn more.

On a positive note, I had a dream last night that his survivors had a 12-day plan for making everything available to Steve's clients.

In the meantime, I would encourage any of you who were being hosted by DataWordPro to email sales or billing @coastalinc.com and express thoughts similar to mine so we can apply pressure to force a determination one way or the other. Each passing day of downtime intensifies the negative impact for all of us and, potentially for Steve's survivors.

Dr. Ron Capps (aka the NicheProf)

Don, the best answer we have regarding a timeline is the one I posted in Coastal Internet Solutions, Inc response to me. From all indication, Steve's daughter and, perhaps, sister are the one's responsible for corporate business decisions and actions. I have been unable to get a response from anyone at DataWordPro (tried email, support desk & telephone). Steve's Twitter account hasn't been touched in over two years.

Coastal's response indicates they are in contact with someone at DataWordPro and they hope to have a response in 24 to 48 hours.

If we have any point of access or leverage, it is probably through contact wit Coastal and their communicating with the survivors.

It's very sad to hear about Steve. All of my sites went down at noon today. I have VPS and Dedicated hosting and received the exact email response from Coastal as Ron.

Let's hope something happens soon.

Mark,

Thanks for the informative call.

Hi,

I find myself in a similar situation. I am (was?) a member of Steve's Blog a Month club and at the end of November found that my sites were way behind schedule - I got a note apologizing but did not have time to cahse up because of family issues.

Now I can't access any of the sites nor are any of the email or project boards associated with the BLOG monthly site working.

Does anyone have any advice about who to try? The only dns data I have is ns1.whiterockserver.net
ns1.codebluehost.net
ns1.bluefoxhost.net .

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

Ron,

Thank you for your radio show today about the nice tribute to Steve and helping those looking for solutions.

~ Regina

Hi Dirk,

I'm on Ron's BlogTalkRadio page and clicked the player on the right. The direct link to the replay is here: School for Social Marketing Dr. Ron Capps and Ken English 2/6/2011 - Niche Radio | Internet Radio | Blog Talk Radio.

~ Regina

Just click on the top item in the blogtalkradio player on the page located here School of Social Marketing | Internet Radio | Blog Talk Radio Dirk

You may have to turn up your speakers. I seem to have had a low recording level on the broadcast.

The RSS feed for the shows is School of Social Marketing | Blog Talk Radio Feed

iTunes player:
School of Social Marketing | Blog Talk Radio Feed - Download free podcast episodes by Niche Radio on iTunes.

Hope that helps, Dirk

There's a Memorial Guestbook for Steven Mark Hetrick here:

Steven Mark Hetrick Guest Book: sign their guest book, share your condolences, or read their obituary at Patriot-News

The guest book will remain online until 2/28/2011.

here's the 6:51pm ET update from CoastInc.com

-- click here to read update --

Best,
Mark Hendricks

Holly, I've just used the support desk and Coast has always gotten back to me really quickly. I'm looking at several thousand domain names spread across "numerous" dedicated servers.

A question I have is what does their "Fully Managed" service really include.

Interesting times :-)

Willie

Holly,

If you have a dedicated server, just fill in the form like:

server.whatever.com ip address of server = nn.nnn.nnn.nn (whatever yours is)

and fax it to them on that form, include your phone number

then fill in the webform - include your last paypal statement showing date, trans ID, price, etc

include same info on dedicated server as the fax info above, make sure to use a yahoo or gmail address as your contact email

I was back up in about 20 minutes after all things were sent to them.

Mark

Andy --

CoastInc really controls all the servers (my understanding), so when
you become their customer they turn on your reseller
account and all sites should come up.

All data is still on server, I believe... they were just
turned off or disconnected from internet during this
last few days.

Mark

I pre-paid yearly for the Advanced SEO plan on 12/29/10. I went ahead and filed a paypal dispute, not sure if I'll be able to recover anything. Still within the 45 days to file a claim.

i was most likely among the first to fax and fill in webform, since
then lots of folks are probably setting up accounts, and if they
have domain or reseller accounts, those may take more effort
for coastinc to turn on, instead of just one ip address for the
main server to turn on all of your domains at once.

they said they would send me a paypal button later today
for payment.

Best,
Mark

a tech named John called me to get the server ip address (he overlooked on the fax I sent, and the note I placed in the webform) -- and said to try to access some of the sites that I had not changed nameservers, after "a while".

So, if some of the domains that you did not change nameserver info come up in browser, then it's time to change back those nameservers you did change.

Mark

Holly,

I just went back to registrar and put back in the same nameserver info that I had before all this happened on the few domains that I changed. So now all points back to the dedicated server.

Mark

There are quite a few ways you can fax from your computer using your scanner. I have used faxbetter for times when I just couldn't be bothered to go to the store.

Surprisingly Coastal just replied at 11:45 pm Est regarding the suspended message and when they are going to invoice.

------------------
Technical Support Response:

We are still working on restoring all the access, if you have already signed up, it should be back up within a few hours. The suspension notice is due to a problem in the billing software.

------------------
So crosses fingers.. At this point, I'd rather not be back up at all until all was resolved than to have a suspended page with that verbiage. The site was up earlier and looks like a billing software problem. We've just had a celebrity whom we've interviewed in the past that frequents the site daily contacting us tonight freaking out wondering what's going with the site.

Just google domain to ip lookup and you will find a service where you can find the ip address of your domain(s).

I just used: Convert Host Name to IP Address or Find IP address of a host - e.g. find IP address of host name of
Here is another: Whois - IP Address - Domain Name Lookup

If your domains are all on the same server, most likely the IP address will be the same for all.

Cheers,
Noel

if you go to your command prompt (type cmd in your 'run' window on Windows) and then type: ping www.yourdomain.com

It will tell you the IP address of any website.

My sites are showing the same message and I have no intention of signing up with them. The few remaining sites that I have not yet transferred away are displaying that very annoying message. It would have been better to leave them offline.

Most of my important sites are now online at Hostgator. I'm glad that I made the decision to move quickly when we first realised that something was seriously wrong. You guys still waiting must be really hurting by now.

Yes, although it's a little better than the message that first showed
up on many of my clients sites that said "SUSPENDED" giving their
customers the impression that they were perhaps completely out of
business.

I don't understand why they didn't just leave them live either.

Willie

First - I don't know anything about the financials between DataWord and Coast. I've got to believe Coast has been making money from DataWord for a few years now and have a history built up.

However, from a customer service standpoint, I would think the best thing Coast could have done was leave the accounts live and send out a notice saying your account will stay live until Feb xx, at which time you must have an agreement signed with us to continue.

In other words, be helpful to those affected and leave a good impression of their hosting service. Show some grace.

The way Coast is handling this isn't sitting well here.

I understand they must be overwhelmed.

I just bought a business from one of my biggest competitors. It was multiple sites, good sized list, membership site, etc. I am going out of my way to handle all the customer service issues that were outstanding - because I care for the customer and am concerned for the long-term relationship.

I'm learning some valuable lessons in going through this transition from DataWordPro. And I won't allow my business to be held up like this in the future.

Charlie

I don't know jack about the hosting business but here's a little story:

Once upon a time, there was a zoo where one of the zookeepers died.

This zookeeper had charge of lots of specialized animals kept in different cages all throughout the zoo, and they were all being fed their specialized food and were relatively happy, at least they could carry on their lives as they were used to living.

They were all peaceful well-behaved creatures, they paid their bills, so to speak.

But when the zookeeper died the big zoo managers got worried and said "Who is going to pay for their food now?"

- so they let all these animals out of their cages, all at once.

The creatures started complaining and making noises - they couldn't live their lives outside their cages, and they were wandering all around the zoo now.

The zoo managers said "Uh oh, we've got to do something!" but since they had stopped feeding the animals and made them all get out of their cages, they were all mixed up and hard to track down now.

"Let us find you, and find your cages! We'll be your zookeeper now!" "Let us sort this out and you start paying us like you did the other zookeeper!" was the message they broadcast throughout the park.

But the creatures were starving and confused - they would have loved to get on with their lives as before, but they had no idea where each of their cages were, or their cage numbers, and they didn't know how to mix their specialized food - they had just paid their creature wages before, and it had been done for them.

They also felt like they had been shut out in the cold by the new zookeepers:

- "Why didn't they let us stay in our cages?" they cried. "Do we really cost that much to feed that we had to be kicked out in the cold immediately?!"
-
- Many of the creatures felt they had no choice but to find another place to live.
-
- Others decided to stay in the bounds of the zoo and do the best they could.
-
- All of them resolved to keep better watch in the future.

And the zoo was never the same again.

The End

Mark H.
I think you just got lucky.

The rest of us did not.

Even after being carefully polite (though aknowledging my anxiousness), now they have changed the status of my ticket to HOLD.

What does HOLD mean? When I try to reply to it, it bounces to another page, and fails to add my reply.

How stinking hard is it to just turn on the domains and IP addresses we gave them? Really, they already RAN the servers! Is it that hard? Are they just incompetent?

I also never heard back from the BILLING department . . . has anyone else heard back? Have they set up payments with you??

Is the negative press toward COASTINC hosting going to ruin their business in the end? Because they are not helping themselves.

Is it just two people working out of their basement, and leasing the servers from GNAX? Sort of like what Steve was doing??

Wow! Thanks Mark. That is a very IMPRESSIVE email they sent you.

I wonder why they seem to frequently respond to you, but not to other customers??

"Unfortunately for legal reasons, we can not disclose the specific reason why."

That sounds like a BS argument, which is not true legally, but . . . whatever.

The rest of the email is superb. Makes me feel more confident in WAITING FOR THEM to fix things. I hope it is not just a great example of PR spin, but rather a real indication of their situation.

Thanks again for sharing here.

Most of my servers are offline. Some never went down. I don't see
any real rhyme or reason for why certain ones are offline and others
are not.

Willie

Mark, all of my servers are dedicated, and I didn't get that
second message from CoastInc.... so they "may" have just sent it to
customers on dedicated servers who they had already taken care of.

Willie

For those of you who had DatawebPro/Godaddeo for a Domain Name Registrar, I contacted Godaddy because I could not get to the Datawebpro's reseller link to manage my domain names.

They asked me to pass along the link to manage your domains if you didn't already find it.

https://mya.securepaynet.net/default...og_id=dataword

I just moved 12 domains from Datawebpro's reseller account to my Main Godaddy account.

However you don't have to do anything, they informed that in this situation, they'd pass all accounts to another Reseller since DatawebPro is out of business.

By the way, ALL of my correspondence with Coastal Inc has been professional and tactful. In no way was I ever beligerant with them.

After attempting to work with coastal in getting access to my sites for some time now and not getting anywhere. I got an email from them Yesterday basically saying they are giving up and turning over control to Gnax, the parent company.

Below is a pasted copy of the email. But first, I have a few things to say on the subject.

One word about their statements: Bulls#!t

They could have easily handled the problem by issuing a public statement on their status. In the statement, they could have said we will activate all the servers and give customers the option to get their data. They could have set a time limit on the active servers of 2 weeks or so as well as offered to pick up the accounts of customers who wish to stay. Problem solved.

Instead, they chose to go through every account, reset passwords, set up a suspended page and make it impossible to get our sites. Going through each account like this wasted a great deal of time, rather than making any attempt to help existing customers. Basically they screwed things up to the point where they throw up their hands and give up.

Again, this could have been resolved easily. They chose to mess with the servers and accounts when they could have opened them up for a period of time. Flipping bulls#!t.

To say "We apologize again but with all due respect to the late Steve Hetrick, the mess left to us made it virtually impossible to clean up in a timely or practical manner."
Again, I say bulls#!t. My stuff all worked before coastal got a hold of it. All they had to do was shut the servers off during the black out period. Then fire them up for a 2 week period giving us the option to open an account with coastal or get our data and move to another server.

Now that they took all the time to alter the passwords to our accounts, there may be no chance to sort it out. Way to go coastal. Their attempt to take control of Steve's accounts backfired and now all of us who were customers are screwed.

They can play this off as Steve's fault and his mess. Again I say bulls#!t. My Stuff worked great when Steve managed it.

"Gnax will be taking over and care of the entire dataword situation. All dataword's servers have been given to them, which contains their billing system and customer contact info." Looks like Coastal had all our contact info all along, as we suspected.

Lets hope that Gnax handles things more professionally, but with all the time Coastal spent altering accounts, passwords and setting up the landing pages, the accounts may be too messed up now.

I sent this to Jeff Hinkle at Gnax:
_______________________
"As a gesture of good will, something that would help calm the masses could be:
Make an announcement about the status of the servers and accounts. Offer to take on existing customers with current pricing. Fire up the servers with say a 2 week window where customers could get their data and either move on or stay with you.

The above is just a thought. It's a tough time for all customers, providing options would be a good thing to do. Some will likely stay with you, some won't. Either way, you look good to all concerned."
________________________

Again, lets hope they handle things professionally and do the right thing!

End of Rant.
John

________________________ email from coastal inc:

Once again we apologize that this is taking longer than expected. When we were practically forced to take over these accounts, we had no idea what we were getting into. We found that almost every customer had multiple accounts spread across multiple servers and there were literally thousands of domains like this, even including multiple different class c/secondary ips, custom nameservers, etc. We had no list of domains, no accurate server names, no ip distribution, etc. To make matters worse, dataword recently moved many of the ips from old to new servers and when customers gave us the information to reactivate it did not exist.

The rep from dataword has stopped responding to us and did not provide any helpful information on where accounts were located, who the customers are, which servers they were on, etc. In fact, we still do not know how many customers they had.

Even after setting up a dedicated staff team to work solely on this issue 24x7, we are still inundated with requests to find ips/accounts that can't be located and are receiving numerous outraged emails from people that are simply not understanding the complexity of this mess and that WE are the good guys trying to help. We did not make this mess nor cause it. We were working as fast as possible to resolve it but logistically takes a long time. Unfortunately after discussing with the president of the datacenter, Gnax, this is something that they are better able to handle. We will be giving all the servers back to them and they will be in contact with you to deal with any remaining issues.

An email account specifically for these issues will be setup within 24 hours: dataword@gnax.net
In the meantime, you can contact jhinkle@gnax.net for any questions or assistance.
Once again, please be aware that everyone is trying to help clean up the mess. So sending threatening or abusive emails yelling will not help. Please also try not to submit multiple emails for the same issue as that only creates more unnecessary work to go through.

Please note, we are no longer in the loop with any of this. We have not sent out any bills nor charged anyone. Gnax will be taking over and care of the entire dataword situation. All dataword's servers have been given to them, which contains their billing system and customer contact info.

Any further contacts to us regarding this will be forwarded directly to Gnax.

We apologize again but with all due respect to the late Steve Hetrick, the mess left to us made it virtually impossible to clean up in a timely or practical manner.

Thank you,
Coast Internet Solutions, Inc.

I have to agree with Holly's posts. I too, am a bit suspicious of GNAXs story.

However in their favor, they seem to be pretty big, with over 6,000 servers, and an upper management team of 9 people.

https://www.gnax.net/company/management.html

So fingers crossed . . . . again.

On behalf of Harry Hinkle, Principal, CEO of GNAX.

I invite anyone who is having issues with dedicated servers to reach out to us. If you are continuing to have issues with regards to Shared, reseller or VPS services - please do e-mail the address we have setup for this matter and if you still feel inadequately dealt with - *please* reach out to me directly and I will investigate your specific case.

Jason Scales
Senior Account Manager

1100 White St., SW
Atlanta, GA 30310
Office: (404) 230 9150 (ext. 221)

Direct Line: (404)-753-2172

Fax: (404) 230-9149
jscales@gnax.net
GNAX | Home
Virtual Private Data Center - Dedicated Server Hosting - Cloud Server Hosting - Atlanta Hosting - Dallas Hosting

Thanks Mark, Regina, and Colin.

Regina is absolutely amazing at tracking down
who can help resolve problems FAST once it is
determined that yet another party/company is
in someway involved.

An example is when I discovered that BURST
was who I needed to talk with to fix problems
on a server. Within minutes, Regina had me on
the phone with the right people who told me how
to deal with IP problems, problems with cPanel
licenses, etc.

This whole episode with DataWebPro-related problems
has been a real challenge for many of us. If you are
a casual observer, imagine having customer scattered
across numerous servers, at numerous locations,
controlled by numerous parties to varying degree, and
only discovering some of these relationships when an
IP tied to perhaps a DNS server expires.

While it is frustrating, and I understand tempers flaring,
I appreciate the positive contributions of those most
who, instead of seeking to vent, asked how can we just
get people's websites back online... and realized spreading
negativity often just slows the process dramatically.

Willie

I disagree. There's many smaller companies out there who deliver top class service. Steve gave his clients top class personal touch priority service - something you won't get at HostGator and other corporate shared hosting companies.

Jason Scales
Senior Account Manager

1100 White St., SW
Atlanta, GA 30310
Office: (404) 230 9150 (ext. 221)

Direct Line: (404)-753-2172

Fax: (404) 230-9149
jscales@gnax.net
GNAX | Home
Virtual Private Data Center - Dedicated Server Hosting - Cloud Server Hosting - Atlanta Hosting - Dallas Hosting

"I keep doing because the world was built by doers!"

I've tried a dozen companies over the past 15 years ranging in price from free to over $400 per month for packages. It all depends upon what your needs are.

I liked the personal attention that I got from Steve a Data because I had a lot of dumb questions that he patiently took the time to answer.

If a company charges too little, they can't afford to have a lot of customers calling in with questions, and special requests. They will also pack as many accounts onto a server as is practical, hoping that they most use a tiny fraction of the allocated bandwidth. When you exceed acceptable usage standards... usually not that clearly specified, then you are asked to go with a dedicated server.

I got on my first dedicated server because I was invited by one of those large companies to take my business elsewhere. Then again, I've had ISP's make the same request since I use so much bandwidth just in uploading/downloading files :-)

I do think that you need to know that who you are dealing with has a contingency plan and that your business is protected. I don't think that large companies do that any better than smaller companies in that respect. Some of the largest companies often have complete idiots working for them who follow a checklist when troubleshooting. They won't get your business back up any faster than some techie with servers sitting in his basement.

It does make a lot of sense to do your due diligence regardless of who you go with.

Willie

Good tip for many people.

We have full backups and can recreate a site on a new host in15 / 20 minutes.

Our issue is that we would appreciate a reply, any reply would do, from our host (NicheSimple) so we know what route to take - to wait or to forget this all as a bad dream and hightail with our business, associated customers and future recommendations to elsewhere.

I paid for annual hosting through Paypal on 12-12-10, and my sites began going down 2-6-11. When I called Paypal I was told I couldn't get a refund because 45 days had passed.

Was your refund within Paypal's 45 day grace period? Or should I have played the "pro-rata" card?

howdo-i:

I just received something similar.

Forward the info to:

jscales@gnax.net

Explain *politely* the confusion.

I've found him to be very helpful.

Mark Hendricks




.

Hi Caleb,

Yes I'm sure that is sort of what has happened but let me point out that my contract was with DatawebPro which was cancelled by DatawebPro themselves. Gnax or CoastInc have previously stated that any money paid to Datawebpro is nothing to do with them so they would be trying to bill me now even if I hadn't got a refund from Paypal.

Also they have not even tried to ask me if I want to sign up with them. They can't now claim that they don't have my contact details because they clearly do.

I know that you are trying to give Gnax the benefit of the doubt here but when the first contact I get from a business is an invoice and they fail to respond to my emails then I'm sorry but there is something seriously wrong with that business.

When did they make that promise? and who to? It certainly wasn't made to me at any time.

I would still give them a try. What have you got to lose? The product was clearly not delivered as stated so they might waive the 45 day limit.

Yes, consolidating. . . . in other words: SUCKING.

They don't want to honor the same packages that Steve was running, which were admittedly rather unorthodox.

However, GNAX seems happy to collect far too much MONEY for the account, and just consolidate them into one server. Effectively giving us a $6 per month shared account for far MORE money.

Not to mention they take days to answer tickets, and when they do, they promise to reply soon, and then it is another 48 hours until you hear back.

Then you reply quickly, and wait another 24 hours to hear again.

Then you reply super quickly, and wait 36 hours to hear back again.

Ad nauseum.

Poooooor customer service in my experience.