My new webhosts, www.site5.com, have seen fit to take down all my websites without notice after receiving a complaint of spam, supposedly from ‘Feedback’ at my domain. Needless to say it was nothing to do with me. I apologise if this causes a problem to anyone, and I hope that they will reinstate my service quickly. If the sites remain down for long, I will move hosts over the weekend and let my credit card company teach them why this sort of behaviour is not a good idea.
(Some hours later): I’ve now temporarily moved hosts back to www.pair.com, and email should come through and most of the sites should now be functional, although with the odd broken counter. Site5 support was very strange; they ignored all my queries and requests for help and just added a note telling me to make a case to them (which I did, and they ignored it), and that they were ‘down to earth guys’ (?!?). In fact they never did anything, as far as I can tell. I registered a domain with them; they’ve been ignoring a request for a transfer code for that too. All in all, very bad, bad people to deal with.
The behavior of your host may not be above reproach, but it may also be within reason. If you have any kind of feedback form or refer-a-friend form that sends email, it can sometimes be exploited to send out spam. Check and Double-Check all your forms on your site to make sure they cannot be abused to send out spam. I once had this problem, and letting it go even a few hours, the host shut it down until we figured out the troublesome script and I fixed it.
Thanks for the suggestion, and I thought of this myself. But there was no indication from Site5 on this. I will have a look and see, although I think not.