Hostzilla - seems like monkeying around with me - OR NOT?

Hi - Towards the end of last year I purchased a yearly plan which includes registering a domain name (which i did straight away) but for a while the account remained dormant. Today I contacted their support for help because I was unable to ftp to their server with the details provided by them.
Know I don’t know if this is normal practice or not but without my authorization I got a reply saying that they have charged my card for the exact same domain name that I registered with them about 5 months ago. I was able to ftp to their server and launch their cpanel, but I wrote back to them explaining that for one I never placed the order for purchasing the domain name and secondly I have a receipt which shows that I had purchased and registered that same domain name about 5 months ago.

About half an hour after sending that response I began noticing that I was completely blocked out of everything. I could not access my site, or the cpanel, or ftp into their server.

Again I wrote back to them explaining that now I was unable to access anything, and they responded to me by first dogging the earlier question about the unauthorised charged which I incurred and only replying to my second point as follows :

Your account appears to be activated and responding normally. If you have had several failed attempts at logging in to your CPanel, our firewall may have locked out your IP address as a security precaution. To resolve this we will need to know what your IP address is.

Please visit www.whatsmyip.org, and find your IP address (which will be displayed in large text across the top of the page). Copy and paste it into a reply to this ticket, and our L3 Techs will get the block removed so that you can access Hostzilla servers, including your website and CPanel.

The above response indicates to me that they are most likely monkeying around with me, or is this something that can happen in real life although I can’t see how - I after having access to everything inc. the website then only to be left hung and dry after having made a complaint.

Would be very interested in hearing about your views regarding my experience…

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The firewall block can happen anytime. For example, if your computer has a virus, trying to scan port on their server, then firewall can block your IP automatically. However, with any block, they should have reason. Check your old IP, and ask them for the reason.

For payment issue, might be the technical supporter transfered your question to billing, and they will answer you later?

sometimes it happens, there might be some technical issues.

Hi Everyone - thanks for your advise and finally I’m back up and running again.
About the charge they explained that it’s something that gets generated automagically and that I have not been charged - which I hope is the case because if they refunded the amount then my bank charges me a fee for the initial transaction itself.

Firewall blocks are normal. If you get blocked again in the future, ask them why it was blocked. It can be for a variety of reasons, even checking your mailbox too often can result in a block.
But by knowing what the issue was, you can help prevent it in the future by changing your habits slightly (i.e. switching to IMAP in the case of checking mailbox too often).