Last week, we brought you the story of Mick, whose dedicated server was compromised and he was hit with $5700 in bandwidth charges. Many readers, especially those working in the field, had questions about the particulars of his plan and contract with the Web host. The company, Servepath, contacted us with those details, as well as some crucial background information.

For starters, Mick is a former consultant of ServePath who was receiving a free service from us during his employment here and after. He was given a free server with the agreement that he would pay for any bandwidth. He was not paying for managed server hosting. His server was essentially, by agreement, unmanaged by us and managed by him.

Checking his LinkedIn profile shows this. [Link redacted, but it does. -Ed.]

That being said, our Terms of Service clearly state: “ServePath has no obligation to monitor the Service for AUP violations or for other illegal or improper conduct” and

“Customer is responsible for maintaining security and for maintaining patches and disaster recovery systems, except to the extent ServePath specifically accepts such responsibility by listing such service features in Customer’s Signup”.

We did offer a number of various remedies to correct the issue. Also, no payment for charges incurred had been made since November 2008 on this account.

Lastly, we have settled the account with him this afternoon.

I hope that you can post an update to your article that says that we made best business efforts to resolve this with him over a period of time, and, coupled with the fact that he was receiving the server (unmanaged by us) for free, and ex-consultant of ours and responsible for the bandwidth charges that were incurred, that the full story had not been revealed.

So the bandwidth situation has been resolved, Consumerist didn’t have all the facts in our initial post, and keep an eye on your servers if you don’t want this to happen to you.

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