Complaint Review: Upstate Design Group

My story: I own and operate a small heavy equipment related business. I hired Benjamin Kay owner of CNY Website (now Upstate Design Group aka UDGNY) Jan 2015 to repair an existing eCommerce website. Repairs were estimated at 10-20 hrs worth of work. Was sold 2 "blocks of time" 10hrs each at $30/hr. After approx 6-8 months Ben had been unable to fix the site and aledgedly contacted Godaddy the hosting company for advice. According to Ben Godaddy recommended replacing the "template". Ben sent over an agreement for me to sign stating that if I paid him an additional $450 to replace the template everything would be fixed guaranteed. I paid the $450 as I had been losing customers due to the issues with the site and needed it fixed ASAP. After the template change, which I'm not sure was ever done, I was told that the site was not worth the time and effort to try to fix and that Ben (UDGNY) would build a whole new site in 2 phases, basic site being phase 1 and the eCommerce portion or shopping cart being phase 2, at no charge as a "save client promotion" and that phase 1 would be launched prior to 2016. This was around the end of November first of December. Feeling grateful at the time for Ben's offer to build a new site at no cost, I agreed to purchase a 1 year support plan he offered for site support, hosting and some other services. It was his "Unlimited Support Plus" plan. He even did me the courtesy of discounting it to $1640 from what I believe was the reg price of $2028. I never received any of the services included in the support plan. To this day my website is not functioning properly which has resulted in a conservative estimate of thousands of dollars in lost sales over the past year and 4 months if not tens of thousands. I was also recently contacted by Shawn Tooley of North Country Design. He informed me that he had been contacted by Ben (UDGNY) numerous times regarding my website and had been curious if Ben had ever gotten the site fixed. This is when I learned of Shawns misfortune with Ben and UDGNY along with that of many others some of which I have contacted and retained permission to tell their stories. Also after a recent post on my business FB page I was contacted by Wendy Dryden at Bruin Computer Trading who recounted their story. In an attempt to avoid hear-say I will let each of them tell their own stories. I have supporting documentation of most everything, including emails and computer screen shots of documents that have since gone missing from Ben's websites. I hired an attorney to draft a demand letter to which we have gotten no response. To this day I have $3700 invested in UDGNY including attorneys fees. This of course does not include the loss and continued loss of sales. As advised by my attorney, "it would cost more in attorneys fees to sue" than I would ever be able to recover. I'm told my only option is small claims but that is limited to $3000 and since Ben has moved  UDGNY from the Syracuse area to Ithaca, I now have to travel to Ithaca to file the small claims action. Remember, I am self employed and have a shop to run. I can't afford to take time off to, the way I see it, CATER to a criminal. I'm the one who's getting screwed. He should have to appear HERE in Syracuse. At this point it has become more of a principle thing and I am attempting to keep this from happening to others. Incidentally Ben has a track record of changing businesses and business names. Four or more in the past 7 years that I know of. Shawn Tooley would know more about this. In addition, I am told he is not responding to phone calls or emails and his current business website UDGNY.com is "down for maintenance" and I can no longer log in to his "client portal" to view or retrieve any supporting documents. However, if you recall, I have most everything. I logged in and printed, copied and took screen shots of most everything before the site conveniently went down. Please contact me for more information and additional contacts at 315-559-4992 so we can prevent this from continuing.