Legal Question in Business Law in Hawaii

web hosting breach of contract

When calling to discuss server outages, the owner of

our web hosting company denied a (provable) previous

problem. After insisting to him that our domain was

down for over 24

hours he became irate and after exchanged words, he

took our whole site down from the IIC server. Leaving

us (again) without internet presence for 24 to 36

hours while we switched to an accountable hosting

company. The contract on their sites reads that if

they cancel an account, they give four days notice.

On a separate issue, same phone call, I asked him

about the status of credit card payments I had made to

them in error for a domain name registration (it

should have been - and subsequently was - paid to a

different party). He told me that I would have to go

through a lengthy procedure for this information, I

offered that I could just charge it back on the credit

card and he threatened to send me to collections if I

did that and charge me 3x the amount of the chargeback.

Besides the breach of contract, can they just pull our

site down like that? Isn?t that like a landlord

throwing a tenant to the curb? Also, isnt that an

illegal (besides threatening) to take us to

collections at 3x the chargeback amount?


Asked on 8/29/01, 5:24 pm

1 Answer from Attorneys
Timothy J. Walton Internet Attorney

Re: web hosting breach of contract

Can the hosting company pull your site? It appears that it can and did. Of course, if that is a breach of your contract, then there are legal remedies available to you. Depending upon the specifics of your situation, there may also be ways to characterize the action as tortious. You need to seek competent counsel in your area.

However, it is not like a landlord/tenant action. The Legislature in California has recognized the special character of a person's home, so there are certain protections built into the law. These apply only in that context, and not online.

Finally, if someone were to wrongly assert that another person owed a debt, and pursue collection when the debt was not actually owed, this would be a violation of the Fair Debt COllection Practices Act, 15 USC 1962e.

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Answered on 9/17/01, 1:31 pm


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