I happened across Thunder and Roses because the person behind that site shares my disdain for Ashanti Alston, a bank robber who is welcomed on college campuses as a “revolutionary voice” because he claims he was a “political prisoner”.
But I happened to notice another post at the site about a blogger who was being kicked off by her hosting service and was looking for an alternative in a hurry. So why was this other blogger being evicted? Because she was running Movable Type!
At first I thought there had to be some misunderstanding somewhere, so I checked out the host site, Positive Fusion, and sure enough there’s this notice,
Effective immediately new installations of Movable Type are prohibited from being used on Positive Fusion.
Existing installations of Movable Type will have comments and trackback disabled until further notice. Usage of Movable TypeÂ’s commenting system is now a Resource Abuse Policy violation may result in suspension and termination of hosting account.
Apparently, Positive Fusion feels they’re being overwhelmed by comment/trackback spam and have decided the solution is to simply ban users from enabling those features and installing Movable Type altogether.
Suburban Blight, the blog that Thunder N Roses mentioned was looking for a new host, claims that,
This morning, I received a nasty mail from my blog-host, stating that my comments and trackbacks had been disabled again, and that as of the 15th of July, they would no longer continue to host this blog. I am accused of “rampant resource abuse”, even though I’ve done every single technical upgrade my host has asked of me, even though I follow their usage guidelines to the letter, and even though I’ve only received maybe three-hundred spam trackbacks and comments in the last few days, a paltry sum. For them, this is “rampant resource abuse”. The host offers no guidance as to how to bring this blog back into compliance with their regulations, just “we’re not interested in you as a customer”.
I won’t make any sweeping nasty statements about this host – mama always told me that if you don’t have anything nice to say, then shut the hell up – and, hey, they’re still hosting my blog. so they have my data by the short hairs. But, in the spirit of “Blight Recommends”, I will tell you that this host is Positive Fusion. Do with that information what you will.
This wouldn’t be half as funny if Postive Fusion wasn’t currently bragging in its promotional materials about its superior Movable Type support,
Whenever a new technology is made available and would prove valuable to our clients we will install, test, and subsequently make available that technology. One example of this, as many of our clients use software such as Movable Type, when a new version became available utilizing a perl module known as Image Magick we made sure that our clients would have access to it. Our implementation of WebDAV is another good example of continuing to improve upon offered services.
So, apparently, they’ll offer their clients top notch technical support and help . . . until they don’t!
People considering PostiveFusion for hosting might want to think twice.
