Brinkster Alert: Deactivations & Bogus Bandwidth Errors

Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2003 1:12 am (20 years, 11 months ago)

If you're hosting on Brinkster, you may want to check your account to see if it's been deactivated for 'bandwidth errors.' There's something going on at Brinkster where they've sent out a newsletter and then deactivated hosting accounts, claiming that Brinkster e-mails were being rejected by your e-mail account. It's a bit confusing to say the least.

Here's my experience, in case it helps:

I've had a Brinkster account for about six months now, and when I logged into my e-mail today, I noticed a few downtime monitor reports for my site, which isn't too unusual. By my estimate they've been averaging one or two 15 minutes breaks of downtime a week over the last six months, so it would've been very easy to skip over the reports and not find out that my site had been supposedly deactivated for exceeding their bandwidth limits.

After checking my web logs and seeing that my bandwidth remains extremely low (less than 200K daily, actually!) up to the last two days (where allowable bandwidth seems to be showing as cancelled), I did some hunting around in their forums, and found a few other people questioning what was going on. One answer given by an admin was this:

Brinkster forum admin wrote:

If you are receiving a bandwidth error, it is possible that the email address registered to your account has failed to receive email from Brinkster.

{header2}Resolution{/header2} [sic]

Even if you have a valid email address, if it is too full to receive email or if it rejects Brinkster email, your General account does not receive any bandwidth.

To correct this, you must login to your account and update the email address in the account manager to one that will consistently function properly.

Another admin post I found:

Brinkster forum admin wrote:

RE: Bandwidth error - How to fix it admin
4/21/2003 7:43:49 PM
Due to the growing number of failed email addresses, this measure is unfortunately necessary to maintain the legitimacy of the General accounts. If your account lists an issue with your email address, it IS because email has failed to reach you.

This seems pretty strange, as just two days ago, at the same e-mail address, I'd gotten a Brinkster 'On The Brink' newsletter signed by their 'President & CEO' Jared Stauffer -- so obviously I'm getting at least SOME of their email. I'm also not blocking their e-mail, and haven't had any reason so far to even consider it, although this's the first newsletter I remember receiving from them, and I'll probably like to unsubscribe if that's possible.

I posted a response to the admin letting them know that I'd received their newsletter just fine, and asking what kind of e-mail had been rejected. I also sent a couple of contact form queries to their support saying basically the same thing. So far though, I've gotten no replies.

Anyone else having these kind of problems with Brinkster?

Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2003 2:04 am (20 years, 11 months ago)

Also just checked, and there's nothing even like Brinkster.com on my block list. I check this e-mail account daily, it's always been well below 50% capacity, and should not have rejected any e-mail not on my block list.

Have to wonder if another poster to the same Brinkster Forum could be on target here:

Brinkster Forum Poster wrote:

Are you sure this wasn't a 'ruse' to get people to upgrade? My email has been consistently accepting messages.