Tales from Suburban Bohemia: GX Hosting

This post originally appeared on Stumpy Moose on 5 August, 2001, and was migrated to PraguePig.com on 26 November, 2018.

I’m a bit nervous about writing something negative on the internet because most people who do end up sounding like cranks.

But what the heck. Here goes…

The StumpyMoose.com site exists because our previous site, Phleetwood.com, was stolen by a couple of New Jersey teenagers.

When we were setting up Phleetwood.com we chose a host called GX Hosting. They offered by far the cheapest deal we could find.

They also offered to register the site on our behalf.

Soon, however, the problems started. Our site was down for long periods of time and it became harder and harder to get GX to respond to our complaints.

We decided to change host, and switched over to a company called Thinkhost, with whom we have no complaints. In the process we found out that the Phleetwood.com address was registered to someone called Lex Guberman.

Numerous attempts to contact GX Hosting by e-mail failed so we decided to bypass the red tape of getting the domain transferred and registered StumpyMoose.com. Along the way we hooked up with our fine new host Webstrike Solutions.

In time we learned that GX Hosting had gone out of business.

Earlier this year, however, I had time to kill at work and decided to chase up the people behind GX Hosting, beginning with a bit of research online.

To our amazement, I found out that the people behind GX Hosting were still at high school. The same duo, Guberman and Yusuf Islam, of Manalapan, New Jersey, were also behind a web design company called Maxinweb.

After a bit more searching on the web I also found a bunch of other people who’d had similar experiences with GX.

I also contacted a couple of local newspapers in New Jersey hoping that they might be interested in our story, but there was no response.

When Yusuf Islam finally responded to our e-mails he suggested that we contact Bulkregister.com and get the domain name transferred. But Bulkregister wouldn’t respond to our e-mails and without some positive action on Guberman and Islam’s part Bulkregister would be unlikely to act.

Short of going to New Jersey and forcing Guberman and Islam to transfer the domain name there doesn’t seem to be much that we can do. I’m still looking around for new ideas though.

We’re still trying to get the Phleetwood.com domain name back and we’d welcome any suggestions about what we can do. And I’ll let you know if we make any progress.