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web space removed without notification, without compensation

mastunga
Neighbour

That really sucks. I have had this personal webspace for years; it is referred to at hundred sites; now what do i do? Migrate somewhere else, make it work, re-link, do again the hundreds of things that took to get visibility over years? Again? Because some heartless and customer hating high position honcho decided to screw the paying customers, just like that? Here is my response to the customer rep that notified me about the fact that they bundled my webspace, basically saying take your files and go away, no consequence.

 

Hello Paul,
That is not what I asked for. I had a site that you decided to close without warning, without offering any compensation. You simply closed a service which I found attractive enough to switch completely to Telus few years ago, and which was included as a part of the package of services I was getting.  Having a site on my hobby/entertainment, with a couple of books on the subject, and links placed in the books and exchanged all over the world was important, and essential in my decision. We have had this site for close to 20 years. Now how do I fix all that? I wonder how other people who are in the same boat react. I am sure many of your customers have build personal sites of varying complexity, and most will be quite unhappy about this decision. I have to start everything from scratch. Does anyone at Telus understand the effect of discontinuing this service on your clients, the people who keep your business going? This is very heartless and rude way to stop a service, total disregard to your clients's concerns. And the Telus excuse/explanation is pretty lame -"our software is aging". How about updating it and keep the service going? I mean if you hope to get some of your clients who lost this service to buy paid commercial site hosting, well, I would be too frustrated about the way you dealt with me as a client to buy anything else from you, or to continue with Telus altogether...How about the service I lost? Would I recieve any compensation for it? I guess nothing will really compensate for the work and hardship that you put me through, but at least there should have been something offered. That is not a good business at all... I would rather see a solution that keeps the current site with its address as  it is. If you feel you are not paid enough for these services, increase the fees, do something; I mean what you chose to do is the worse solution I have encountered as a customer of anything so far...

Please feel free to escalate. I do not need my files back, I need my site back, I do have the files, the files are not a solution.
Sincerely,



Paul Puth wrote:


Hello,

You can retrieve your TELUS Subscriber Web’s data by clicking on this link:
38 REPLIES 38

Nighthawk
Community Power User
Community Power User

Venting frustrations at customer service reps isn't fair to them. They have no ability to remedy this situation and it's unfortunate when the CSRs become targets.

 

Personal webspace these days is heavily under utilized thanks to social media. Shaw ended their personal hosting years ago. Bell ended theirs back in 2013. Telus is pretty much the last ISP to offer basic personal webhosting. Upgrading the hardware and software wouldn't be cost effective for such a small user base. Basic shared hosting is cheap these days and in most cases so are domain names. Having a domain name makes moving the site far easier so you won't have to go out and re-link everything.

 

===

 

For those who missed it: The notification from http://web-fp.telus.net/shutdown/index.html:

 

Due to aging hardware, TELUS has made the decision to shutdown Subscriber Web Domain Hosting and FTP Service. All associated websites are no longer available.  If you are attempting to access a website no longer available, please contact the website administrator. Subscriber Web Services will cease operations as of October 1, 2020.  Please remove any files or data you would like to keep. If you require any password help or further assistance please contact the TELUS help desk at 1-888-811-2323.We apologize for any inconvenience and we thank you for using our services.


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Seems like there should be some frustrations to vent. Who do you suggest us to contact, if not the person who delivered the message, that would not require the usual hour or so waiting?

FuzzyLogic
Community Power User
Community Power User

I too have been affected by this. I'm not that worried as it's a fairly old site but this is the first I've heard of this.

 

I think Telus needs to better inform their customers of changes. It shouldn't be that hard to send a message to account holders notifying them of upcoming changes instead of having to find out after the fact. This would give us some time to plan for the change and make other arrangements if required.

 


Just a long time customer hoping to help.

NFtoBC
Community Power User
Community Power User

I can’t believe anyone having a mission critical website would not pay $10 per year to have a registered domain name, allowing them to move their hosting to anywhere that makes sense. Small web hosting providers have come and gone over the past 20 years.

 

My suggestion is you register a domain matching the unique identifier from your telus website, and rebuild from there. Web searches should find your new site relatively easily.

 

Telus stopped advertising and offering website hosting as part of their ISP offerings about 10 years ago, so no surprise they have finally dropped it. On a personal note, I moved my hobbyist websites at about that time, creating and registering a personal domain, and leaving a re-direct on the old site.

NFtoBC
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Except that I cannot really leave a redirect message as all that I see when go to my webpage is the message from Telus:

 

http://web-fp.telus.net/shutdown/index.html

 

Both responses so far seem to be from people who are shilling for Telus; I am sure there are a few other excuses, just as lame as the original one. The problem is that all the sites that link to my site, the site that Telus decided to take down, will now link to the above address, which contains the shutdown message and it is probably some good advertisment for Telus; quoting:

 

Are you looking for a new website? Try TELUS Website Design and Marketing Services

 

but still leave enormous amount of work for us to deal with. I do not care if I have to spent $10 or more for a new domain name, I actually have several of those; cant get one that starts with www3.telus.net, and has my personal webspace on it, can I? I cant rederect to my new sites either. It is so easy to pretend that there is no real problem and that you fail to see what Telus did from a customer perspective... By the way Telus message at the above address says:

 

All associated websites are no longer available.  If you are attempting to access a website no longer available, please contact the website administrator.

 

Nice, indeed; we already had douzens of people inquiring about; many others will not; they will just ignore; I can talk about other  personal consequences for us for hours, but I guess we need PEOPLE to hear us, not just cold and heartless Telus employees preconditioned with their standard answers.

 

 

What kind of response were you hoping to get? Nobody here can give you web space under the Telus domain.

@NFtoBC There are people apparently who run their businesses on Telus email too.  It seems as though Telus shut things down rather suddenly, I wonder if they had a hardware failure which was too expensive to fix.  

NFtoBC
Community Power User
Community Power User

@BillTelusCust 

Could well be a hardware failure, which would explain the lack of notice, and why a request is needed to retrieve website files, as it may need to be gathered from a backup.

 

We can remember what happened to email last fall, whether you were a personal user, or a business user on a personal account. Mission critical presence requires pre-planning and backup plans.

NFtoBC
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husher5142
Friendly Neighbour

Paul and I are on the infrastructure team that this service was/is running on it and I can confirm we are concerned of imminent failure. TELUS ran communication campaigns since early 2019 and we have had scrolling banners up on the FTP sites for the past 2 months. The 2016 campaigns on the other hand were a stop sell and not a full-scale decommission. Anyone that has missed any communication attempts would be considered a true miss. 

For anyone else adversely affected by this issue, in lieu of this service we are offering 3 months of professional services or domain hosting. Please call 1-866-922-5908 and identify you are a subscriber web customer and they will be happy to help you. For clients that are moving their services to another vendor we can offer a blind redirect to your new domain, or we can remove the splash screen for your website. Please call TELUS help desk at 1-888-811-2323 to start this process. Be aware that both of these options will only remain running until October 1, 2020 when all equipment including the server farm, storage arrays, networking equipment, and load balancers will be powered off on this date. 

 

Then consider me a true miss. As well as a friend of mine who is equally upset at not being notified. Both of our sites served one purpose -- a place to put contact information that was indexed by search engines. 

 

For *bleep* sake, how hard is it to put a notice on my bill and/or send me an email at the address in my billing profile? This is just a further continuation of the clusterf*** that is the Telus "organization." Telus enjoys an effective monopoly in many rural areas, so it's not like those affronted by horrible have any real options. All I can say is that Telus should get ready for a mass of people jumping ship once the new LEO-satellite services come online. 

Once again, this is a group of Telus users.

Talk to Telus directly if you want to complain to them.  I'm here to help people fix problems, not listen to your whining.

BillTelusCust: You're reason for being here doesn't concern me. My 2 posts above are in reply to others who posted. That Telus' forum software doesn't make that clear should surprise nobody.

 

My last post is directed to husher5142 who appears to work for Telus. That means that my post is directed to Telus.

Hi there,

I found your post in the forums after we found our website was gone.

I guess we are amongst those people who got totally missed about the shutdown.

We never got any letters and we did not visit the FTP site.

The website is a gallery of about 30 years worth of art work and we only update when there is a new body of work produced.

So the last time we did that was just over 2 years ago.

I guess you can call it a reference site and it is linked by many arts organization websites.

We've signed up with Telus hosting now and changed our DNS info with our domain register.

We have some temporary files up for now but we have lost our Goggle rankings and search results

Unfortunately we have been unable to find out how to download our complete website files from Telus.

It seems that not a lot of Telus folks  don't know about this situation or the old personal web spaces.

Any suggestions on where to find the files?

NFtoBC
Community Power User
Community Power User

You can contact Telus to access the site as described in this message posted above.

 

NFtoBC
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Stephen108
Friendly Neighbour

Thanks for your rely.

I  have already tried the numbers in the post you directed me too.

Over the course of the last days I have waited patiently and talked to numerous nice and well intentioned Telus employees.

The first number got me too a pleasant gentleman who told me that this situation was not under his department's control.

The second number got me to the usual Telus Internet support call room who had no idea what I was inquiring about.

Neither the Telus Web hosting services or their tech help, where I am signed up now, could not help either and sent me to Internet help again.

So I have been passed around like the proverbially hot potato with no ill intentions intended, I am sure.

It still leaves me unable to download the original website from Telus which is why I asked for help on this forum.

Regards

 

FuzzyLogic
Community Power User
Community Power User

FWIW I'm in the same situation. I've been trying for 3 weeks to get an answer from Telus and continue to get bounced around. Phone support people don't seem to have a clue about this. I was told to contact the Telus escalation email mentioned here:

 

https://www.telus.com/en/bc/support/article/ccts-and-cprst-feedback-and-contact-information

 

This resulted in email that suggests I call the Telus HelpDesk again?! I've already spent many hours on the phone with assorted people and they don't seem to know how to help. I have since replied that this is just going in circles and unhelpful. I'm currently awaiting a response.


Just a long time customer hoping to help.

The deadline for retrieving files has been extended now. This is the current notice below. The only username & password I have is for the old website login. The user names just the word web followed by 4 digits , web ****.  I got the new website location, now residing on Telus servers, verified by Goggle and it is now coming up in the searches and is back on top. It is the same domain name as before but it is no longer being redirected by Go Daddy to www3.telus/name/. Telus Webhosting Support walked me through the verification process and were very helpful in that regard. But on the matter of retrieving the files they referred me back Internet Help which goes now where so far. Does anyone know what URL an FTP app should be directed to, to get the files?

 

Subscriber Web Services has ceased operations as of July 30, 2020. TELUS has extended the period that files can be retrieved until November 9, 2020. Website files and FTP contents are still available for download by any FTP client with your username and password.

 

Please remove any data or files you would like to retain. If you require your password reset or need help retrieving your files please contact the TELUS help desk at 1-888-811-2323. We apologize for any inconvenience and we thank you for using TELUS services.

 

Like many on here I too received no notification that my hobby-based website would be terminated. I also had no say in the transfer of email from Telus POP server to Gmail servers. This double whammy all occurred in a matter of days. In my mid-70s I've worked my way through this. Yes there were some hours of frustration and perhaps some extra costs but I'll adapt.

 

However, today I received my Telus bill.  I was "shocked" - yes SHOCKED I say - that after MY hours of work to get Gmail going and the loss of webspace my Telus bill has not DROPPED as a result of the reduced service?

 

What a surprise, the only beneficiary here seems to be Telus!

Stephen108
Friendly Neighbour

Hi Rick81 Were you able to download your website from the Telus? If you did could you please pass on any information on how to do it and which Telus department had good and usable information. Thank you

You may be able to recover some of your site from the Wayback Machine (aka the Internet Archive), depending on when they last scanned your site. Some/all of the HTML files may have been modified to add in the necessary navigation code, but it shouldn't be a huge issue to strip that out.

 

Unfortunately, they stopped scanning the Telus server some time ago so you may not be able to recover much.