"What happened to the website?"
Over the past couple of weeks, the website and email have been up and down. Some of you may have tried to view the website unsuccessfully or had email bounce back to you. I want to explain why.
In a nutshell the web server was hacked. An apparently very sophisticated cyber criminal either took a dislike to, or chose as a random target the nice folks who host my website (www.NewTier.com; Check 'em out. Their forte is sports marketing.)
New Tier is a very small company, as am I, other folks for whom they host, and many other companies victimized by people like this hacker. This person must be independently wealthy. Because they don't have to work and have nothing better to do, they do not realize how much financial damage they cause for small businesses like us.
At any rate, the dedicated folks at NT worked several days to repair the damage and fortify the servers against the likes of this person. Unfortunately, as soon as they reopened FTP access to allow me to continue working on the website, the server was again hacked and essentially destroyed.
So, NT has decided to terminate all web hosting. They were basically doing it as a favor to me and not making any money on it, so I don't blame them. It's certainly not worth the effort required to rebuild the servers multiple times and fortify them against future attack.
As a temporary measure I have transferred all my web hosting to Earthlink. They have a pretty reasonably priced hosting plan. Unfortunately, they have some internal troubles with mergers, reorganization and some other issues. Therefore, while you are now viewing my site on Earthlink web servers and can correspond with me via Earthlink mail servers, you may encounter glitches.
Please let me know if you do encounter such problems or if there are any questions I can answer for you. I will do what I can to resolve them right away.
The website is still somewhat of a mess. I will continue to work to organize it, but my immediate goal is to get as much information onto it as possible.
Thanks for your patience and your continued interest in my products!
John Washington