Response by Pravin Mishra, who is the owner of Pugmarks-Beachcomber:

I apologize for what you perceived to be a poor treatment, nobody deserves one and no one should mistreat anyone. Indeed Pugmarks bought dedicated hosting business of Beachcomber. But fact is Pugmarks did not buy any shared hosting business of beachcomber. We did more investigation in this case. It turns out that you never were Pugmarks or beachcomber customer, nor any of these companies ever received any money from you. You actually signed up for ultra cheap shared hosting from some ebay scammer, perhaps digitalcityhosting who sold hosting to bunch of innocent victims like you, fled with money. When this vendor of yours defaulted, his server got cancelled (which is what most hosting companies do when payment is not received). Subsequently many of the shared hosting customers of digitalcity hosting tried to contact us to either pay us directly or somehow get their contents so that they can have their sites hosted elsewhere. But since we have no way to contact digitalcity nor any way to trace who is legal owner of contents on shared sites, handing out data without authorization can get us into legal soup. Moreover, we do not want to expand into shared hosting because that dilutes our customer support to dedicated hosting customers. It so happened that this hosting company who was a beachcomber customer for short period, evaporated shortly after pugmarks takeover. Yes indeed there were some legit lost shared hosting customers whom we sent back to beachcomber since beachcomber retained the shared hosting. But my friend, you are accusing someone who had no direct relationship with you nor owed any support to you. My staff tells me that you were indeed made aware of this when you reached out to us but you did not want to accept it. Support for beachcomber dedicated customers still comes from the same original support team and servers are still in the datacenters where they were. indeed customers whose servers are old Pugmarks has very attractive options for upgrading to faster, newer and more energy efficient servers. Posted on November 11th, 2008 at 16:41 EST