The Incompetent Data Centers
This morning I received my first letter from an American Debt collector. The debt collectors in question are Amer Assist who are acting on behalf of Layered Technologies.
If you are not aware Layered Tech provide dedicated servers. I did (about 18 months ago if not longer) have a dedicated server with them but not all was plain sailing.
1 day I noticed that the server had been hacked. I requested Layered Tech to format the primary HDD and reinstall Linux on it. I was confident in the knowledge that there was a full backup on the secondary HDD (I know I should have had a local backup but how many people think in hindsight).
Once the repair had been carried out I happily went onto the server and set everything up, I then decided to restore the backup. There was 1 problem the server did not see the secondary HDD so it could not mount. I contacted support and they were adamant they mounted the secondary drive and it should be fine. After several emails they agreed to have a look at it. They claimed that the secondary HDD was broken (funny they shouldn’t have done anything to break this HDD and it was working before the format). My guess is that they were either haphazard in the repairs or they formatted the drive accidentally 9strangely enough in their terms and condition for a repair they deny any responsibility to damage to the server caused by a repair, maybe they have this problem often).
Being annoyed at their incompetence I canceled the server (which did not have any minimum contract length nor cancellation period). I had paid for a full month in advance (I cannot remember exactly how much I should be in credit but I knew it was more than the repair cost). I told them my feelings on the matter and had never heard from them since.
So today I got the letter from the debt collectors, you can guess what my response was. I sent a letter to both Layered Tech and Amer Assist pointing out the repairs were not carried out to a satisfactory standard and that they were still due me money for the lack of service anyway.
Ironically however the date on the letter is 09/18/2007 1 day before they admitted that their help desk had been breached and up to 6000 of their customers usernames, passwords (surely these were encrypted), telephone numbers, fax numbers and address were obtained by hackers (Source). Maybe they should concentrate on looking after their current customers servers and details rather than chasing money they are not entitled too.
EDIT
I have just this minute received a response to an email I sent to the billing department at Layered Tech and they have agreed that I am not liable for the supposed debt and have wiped it now.