# Stay away from OpenTshirtsHosting.com



## j3rman (Sep 15, 2008)

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up on these guys and their seriously shady manner of doing business. I had my site setup through them for about a year and during the entire tenure, I had constant problems with my site. It would constantly have connection issues, email issues, slow loading times, and various other problems. I dealt with it the best I could just to keep my site up and running but what really got me was they changed up their Terms on hosting to not allow any backups of any kind of your site. You can read all about this BS policy right here. Let me go ahead and highlight some things for you:



> *You agree and undertake not to:*
> 
> copy, modify, create derivative works of, download, adapt, reverse engineer, emulate, migrate to another service provider, take backup, translate, compile, decompile or disassemble the OpenTshirts Hosting Hosted Website "ALL OPENTSHIRTS HOSTED WEB SITE ON OUR SERVER", the OpenTshirts Hosting Services (or any part thereof), any Content offered by OpenTshirts Hosting & OpenTshirts Hosting Automated Installation or Third Party Services.
> 
> ...


Basically what that says is if you setup your hosting service with them, you can NEVER have a backup of your site or database and you can NEVER transfer it to another host provider. If you do, they will delete everything and you have no way of recovering your site once deleted.

Here is the section on Transfering to another provider:



> *Transfer From Us*
> 
> all of our customers agreed during their sign up, they can not use any type of backup and or export any file, database, image and content from OpenTshirts Hosting server and their website to any other hosting environment / company with any excuses.
> at the time you are canceling your account your website and all of its information include email user content "everything" will be terminated & deleted immediately from our servers and you have no longer access to them.
> if we find any type of usage of our product and services include the site hosted on our servers outside of our hosting environment you will be charge by the local and our international copyright law.


Like I said before, this policy was not in effect when I signed up a while back. They decided to change it up on me without my knowledge and when I asked for a backup of MY site and MY information, they deleted everything and I lost all of my data. This is by no means an ethical way of doing business. What they are trying to do is lock you into using their service and ONLY their service. If you are not happy (which I can bet you will not be), your only option is to rebuild from scratch on another provider.

Just something to think about when selecting a host provider for your site.

Don't get me wrong, I am not bashing OpenTshirts. That is great software and I thoroughly enjoyed using it the little time that I did. I greatly appreciate all of those involved in the development and support of the software, just use another host provider if you wish to go that route.


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## Viper Graphics (Mar 28, 2009)

I second that, I tried with them as well and 95% of time I couldn't even figure out how to log in and/or work on the site which is not user friendly at all. I just finally gave up. No reply and unless you pay for it, no help what so ever...I was duped. I just wrote it off and made sure the card I used to pay for it was cancelled so no surprise renewals came up. I would recommend Yahoo webhosting over them and that's pretty bad....(


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## g.lupo (Aug 20, 2007)

I have that hosting and it's been ok so far. But I have so much into my website I would hate to start from scratch. There's no way to just transfer the site over?


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## tchandler52 (Sep 17, 2012)

Wow that sucks. Did they lock you out of the hosting account ?



j3rman said:


> Just wanted to give everyone a heads up on these guys and their seriously shady manner of doing business. I had my site setup through them for about a year and during the entire tenure, I had constant problems with my site. It would constantly have connection issues, email issues, slow loading times, and various other problems. I dealt with it the best I could just to keep my site up and running but what really got me was they changed up their Terms on hosting to not allow any backups of any kind of your site. You can read all about this BS policy right here. Let me go ahead and highlight some things for you:
> 
> Basically what that says is if you setup your hosting service with them, you can NEVER have a backup of your site or database and you can NEVER transfer it to another host provider. If you do, they will delete everything and you have no way of recovering your site once deleted.
> 
> ...


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## Biverson (Oct 20, 2014)

Seems phony. From the regular open t-shirts site it states it the software free and open source and can be installed on a standalone or other hosting provider. Now, if you get a plan with open t-shirts hosting I don't think it's within their right to say, "this is 100% ours, you can't move it." They are simply just renting you the space/server for your website. I'm not a lawyer, so don't take this as legal advice.


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## gnizitigid (Jan 23, 2007)

That's bad, you should have been given option to take backup of your data


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## castironrobbie (Oct 17, 2015)

Why select a service based on its name? There are plenty of options out there


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## headfirst (Jun 29, 2011)

I was just on their website and it looks like they have four different backup plans. Do they no offer those anymore?


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## j3rman (Sep 15, 2008)

tchandler52 said:


> Wow that sucks. Did they lock you out of the hosting account ?


Yes, they completely deleted me site and locked me out of my hosting account. I can no longer login to their site to check on my domain either.


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## j3rman (Sep 15, 2008)

Biverson said:


> Seems phony. From the regular open t-shirts site it states it the software free and open source and can be installed on a standalone or other hosting provider. Now, if you get a plan with open t-shirts hosting I don't think it's within their right to say, "this is 100% ours, you can't move it." They are simply just renting you the space/server for your website. I'm not a lawyer, so don't take this as legal advice.


Are you saying my post if phony or their service is phony? 

Yes, you can install the software on any other host provider, that is the point of my post; to warn others NOT to use these guys and use another reliable provider.

I'm not out to just bash these guys. Yes, they have terrible policies and should not be in the business they are in because of what they believe is "right," I'm just giving everyone my experience so they can make a better decision.

No, they have absolutely NO RIGHT to hold their users data & information like that. They did not provide the info or put the work into creating the site so that is extremely unethical. But since they are located in Turkey and I'm in the states, there arent many options for me to take legal action against them for this or any other way of trying to recover my site & data.


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## j3rman (Sep 15, 2008)

headfirst said:


> I was just on their website and it looks like they have four different backup plans. Do they no offer those anymore?


I believe they still offer all 4 of those services but none give you the ability to backup your site. I even asked if I could buy my backup or even upgrade my service just to get the backup and they refused both.


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## Biverson (Oct 20, 2014)

j3rman said:


> Are you saying my post if phony or their service is phony?
> 
> Yes, you can install the software on any other host provider, that is the point of my post; to warn others NOT to use these guys and use another reliable provider.
> 
> ...


Their service, not your post. 

I can understand, but not like, if their software is different than their website builder. I wasn't differentiating the two in my initial post. In this case they can prevent backups if it's their propriety web building software and its not open. But, as you said and advise, stay away from them.


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## j3rman (Sep 15, 2008)

They are hosting open source software. Nothing about their service is proprietary. They can not claim anything they offer belongs to them except maybe the service of installing the software onto their servers for a customer to use on their site. But again, the OpenTshirts software is open source so what right do they have in locking a users data up.


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## Cyberwiz (Oct 29, 2016)

Hello,
I signed up for their hosting and tried to add the Art pack extension to the design studio. The extension was offered as a one off payment. I received a serial key to unlock the extension but it did not work, so I contacted support. They said I needed to upgrade to the Professional version of Opentshirts and would need to pay an additional 324 usd (aprox) 600 total.
I answered "not interested" but they went ahead and tried to charge my credit card for the additional amount. Luckily the bank refused the transaction.

So I asked for a refund, as I had not received the Art pack, and they refused saying I had already entered the unlock key. Then they changed their statement saying I could use the art pack but it would be subject to the professional upgrade fee when the art pack is updated. ??
I continued to ask for a refund which they refused. I said I would reverse the transaction through my bank and they said quote:

"We do stop all charge back  this is our company layer specialty, also legal department sued you, soon have to be in court of law for copyright issue.
Its the lesson you will learn to don't steal from people, mean time your account terminated."

They terminated my hosting account. This all happened within 2 days whilst trying to set up my account with opentshirtshosting.com.
I did not even get to see the art pack and they are claiming copyright infringement as a lame excuse to close my account and keep my money. I don't think they even understand what copyright infringement means.

So make up your own mind about these people, as I will be taking legal action against them, and steps to recover the funds.

Their website opentshirts.com has been down for some time now, but opentshirtshosting.com is still active. For now.

Avoid like the plague!!!!


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## gotshirts2ink (Nov 12, 2009)

glad to know


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