Worst Web Hosting experience? 101
Tim asks: "I have just come through an experience with a web hosting company. Basically, a script on the server was compromised, because of incorrect security settings on the server, and used as a zombie phishing mailer script. My account was suspended for phishing, and through the course of several tickets, it was made clear that I had nothing to do with the phishing. Still throughout the entire ordeal, they refused to give me any of my files, saying that they could not be released now, or ever for 'legal evidence reasons.' So, here I am without a database (I should have backed up!), and without several files I was working on. What is your worst web hosting experience, and how have you dealt with it?"
geocities (Score:1)
Re: Cleverdot et al (Score:4, Interesting)
This can be really, really expensive if your site ever gets Slashdotted.
What I'd like to see is an option to redirect to a "bandwith exceeded' page when the bandwidth is exceeded, with no extra charges.
The problem with this, of course, is that if your bandwidth limit is exceeded near the beginning of the month, your site is offline for the rest of the month.
To avoid this, one company that I checked out had a 30-day "sliding window" bandwidth policy.
This meant that if you exceeded your thirty-day bandwidth limit, your site would be shut down only for the rest of the day.
(Unfortunately, I forgot to bookmark that company, and have been looking for it (or one like it) ever since.)
It would be really nice if sites that review web host providers would indicate which sites are pay-extra-when-bandwidth-is-exceeded, and which are shutdown-when-bandwidth-is-exceeded.
Re: Cleverdot et al (Score:2)
Re: Globat.com (Score:2)
Reading their TOS, it appears that they restrict their low-end customers to files under 10 MB, and attempt to regulate how the bandwidth is used (HTML pages vs zip/bz2 files, etc.).
Since I may eventually have archives and other files over 10 MB on my site, this makes globat.com unsuitable for my needs.
Since I made the GP post, I have signed up with nearlyFreeSpeech.net [nearlyfreespeech.net] (mentioned elsewhere [slashdot.org] in these comments), which has an innovative payment scheme that charges you for what you think that
Try something a little different (Score:2)
Have a look at my uptime - http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:
Re:geocities (Score:2)
I switched to Dreamhost who have been absolutely great at only about $7 a month for a ton of services/bandwidth/storage. If you sign up with this link [dreamhost.com] (or use the promo code 7BACKNOW) you get $7 off...so basically your first month free. There may be better deals but for 20GB st
Re:geocities (Score:1)
1and1 (Score:5, Informative)
Avoid them at all costs. They also go as '1und1' in germany, and oneandone in the uk I believe.
Re:1and1 (Score:3, Informative)
http://faq.1and1.com/miscellaneous/1.html [1and1.com]
Cancellation can be done online now.
Re:1and1 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:1and1 (Score:2)
Re:1and1 (Score:2)
Re:1and1 (Score:1)
Re:1and1 (Score:1, Informative)
when you register a domain your contact information is added to a public whois database for when someone needs to be contacted about that domain. it's very easy for marketers to mine this for people to send information to. doesn't have anything to do with service since every single registrar does this.
Re:1and1 (Score:2)
The trouble is they have a $50/mo plan for a root server and they have a nice internet connection and good backup power. If anyone has recommendations for "service with a smile" and good infrastructure for similar prices I'm all e
Re:1and1 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:1and1 (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately their disk space and transfer pricings are such that it would cost me over 5X as much to host with them than 1&1, for a difference of > $4000 per year. I can also buy local colo space for about that price.
Re:1and1 (Score:2)
However, I started a free 6 month trial for a client who later didn't need it and had a similar bad experience canceling the service despite the fact that the the account had never been used. They insisted on me printing out some form and faxing it to them despite my repeated emails that i was not in the USA and I had no access to a fax machine. Finally, they gave up and cancelled the
Re:1and1 (Score:1)
I know because I work at Google (in the cafeteria).
You control your own experience (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd argue that you're never going to have a good experience if you don't take reasonable care to protect your work. You should never trust an ISP with anything that's important to you. We colo our own stuff, and even though we own our own equipment and trust our ISP, we still assume that the box could at some point in the future become unavailable (stolen, buried under tons of rubble in an earthquake, etc.) Don't blame your hosting service for your own lack of preparation.
Re:You control your own experience (Score:2)
They said they do this to 'protect' the customer from ddos and other charges. Probably my 'worst' hosting experience. Still my uptime is upwards of 200 days on my dedicated server (at $29 per month). I still feel I need more control over everything, so I'm going for their colo service.. colopronto.com at 19 per month
Re:You control your own experience (Score:1)
Re:You control your own experience (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically, a script on the server was compromised, because of incorrect security settings on the server, and used as a zombie phishing mailer script.
To a certain extent this is also the submitters fault. If you must rely on server configuration for security related matters runtime checks for required functionality or config options should be made and if not satisfied your scripts should quickly perform a respectable suicide.
A good example is PHP's magic_quotes_gpc which often protects novice PHP developers from SQL injection attacks, but when moving scripts to a new host where this functionality is disabled it will soon bite them in the arse.
Re:You control your own experience (Score:2)
A prior webhosting company I had used for years (and recommended to several others) experienced a hard disk failure which took down my email and web sites for about 10 days during which time they were attempting to "recover d
Jason Scott's experience. (Score:2, Interesting)
I realize you mean well, (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I realize you mean well, (Score:2)
Re:Jason Scott's experience. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Worst Web Hosting experience? (Score:3, Interesting)
Web Hosting (Score:2)
I've had my share of horror stories - sites down for days and even weeks, nimrods in tech support that don't even know which side of a keyboard goes up, the free consulting I've had to do to get my site(s) back on line, the couple of hacking incidents (neit
Exactly - web hosting is a "market for lemons" (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.dedasys.com/articles/webhosting_market
In short, you're right - anyone can get set up, and it's difficult to tell which ones are any good before signing up!
Re:Web Hosting (Score:2)
I hope you mean 7Mb. A 7MBps = 56Mbps, which is better than a 51.844Mbps OC-1 (A/K/A: T3) line. Otherwise you must crap $100-bills or you live upstairs from an ISP with an unsecured, channel bonding 802.11g network. (Both of which would be pretty sweet.) </nitpick>
Eh, but your UID is almost half mine, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you know what your talking about.
Seriously though, is that a symmetric 7Mbps? I mean, it's
Best solution... move! (Score:2, Insightful)
My worst hosting experience was with a small, cheap company whose only real enticement was unlimited bandwidth. They didn't even meter it, you couldn't ask them how much you'd used in a month... anyway, I never got the whole story on why I was having a problem (they couldn't give me details for legal reasons?), but it had something to do with script kiddies attacking another website on the same box. Every Friday afternoon, mail would start getting sluggish, and by Saturday morning the websites would be down
Best and Worst (Score:2)
Best experience has been with 10for10.com / Simpli.biz. Small mom-and-pop type business yet they're located in the silicon valley with their equipment in one of the best datacenters on the west coast. Doesn't get any better than that!
Re:Best and Worst (Score:1)
Hmm, 10for10.com redirects to for10.com which seems to be some sort of parking service.
You're the second person (with only 10 comments) to recommend simpli.biz, but it just gives me a blank page when I try to load it. I'm not sure how it could get much better than that! :/
Re:Best and Worst (Score:2)
10for10 looks fine though:
http://10for10.com/about.php [10for10.com]
Re:Best and Worst (Score:1)
Re:Best and Worst (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know when it happened, but one day I went to check on my web space, which had always been accessible as www.clark.net/~vgr, and discovered www.clark.net itself was simply redirecting to some Verio promotional page.
Where the hell were my files? After many phone calls to both Verio and to the few ClarkNet contact numbers I had, I learned that when ClarkNet's customers were "migrated," all web files were destroyed. Forever.
Verio's support was particularly irritating, since their first question was always, "Okay, what's your domain name?" I don't have a domain name, you jackass, you guys absorbed the competition who was from a time when domain names weren't handed out like candy. (Which was fine with me; a short URL is a short URL, regardless of the slash count.)
Perhaps if I'd been checking things frequently, I might have caught this at a time when they still had a backup somewhere. But I didn't check the web space frequently, because I never used it for commercial dealings; it was just a place to share some information.
The lesson I learned, of course, is to check one's web site frequently. And, as many other posts have said, back up your files yourself. The standard practices that every admin should follow, such as daily, weekly and monthly backups, are by no means practices to which large corporate ISPs feel bound. Indeed, I've since held a few jobs where it was evident the person administering the Windows server had little or no admin experience.
My Worst Experience... (Score:4, Interesting)
...was about a month or so ago. One day, a Saturday I'm pretty sure, I found that my email from the last three or so weeks was gone. Just...gone. I poked around for a while and realized that my DNS had changed without any warning! They had moved the server over and changed the DNS and had used a version of my data that was almost a MONTH old. They didn't even send a warning email telling me they would be moving servers. Granted this was personal email, and personal web site, but I was pissed.
I emailed back and forth with the sysadmin and could not figure out what the hell was going on, why they were using old data, etc. His final response was, "well, I guess I'll move your up-to-date data over from the old server for you if you want..." I ignored his last email for a day, found a new hosting company (site5.com [site5.com] who I'm quite happy with, they are a LOT better in many big and small ways) moved my data over to my new host (I still could log in using the IP of the old server so I grabbed everything that way as soon as I figured out what was up) and switched DNS. It only took me about a day to get back up and running.
At that point I emailed the admin a response, saying "if I did what you did at my job I would be FIRED. So, you're fired." The name of the company was imagelinkusa--I recommend you stay away from them.
P.S. Yeah, I know I should have been doing backups anyways...
Re:My Worst Experience... (Score:1)
Sucks, doesn
Re:My Worst Experience... (Score:2)
Okay, you've got me--that's much worse considering it was a professional situation--I'd MUCH rather have to deal with this for my own personal stuff than work. Yeesh.
These kinds of things just really makes me wonder how some places stay in business!
Re:Typical ISP behaviour (Score:3, Informative)
Small time providers with no idea (Score:2)
Re:Small time providers with no idea (Score:2)
They leased a cobalt from the provider, which was supposed to be up to date.
It got hacked, and was used to send spam. The ISP shut the server down, and billed the company $500 to re-image the machine (this was about the time the customer called me.) The ISP swore up-and-down that the machine was secure, but a basic audit showed old versions of a bunch of software packages (SSL 0.96b, etc.) which had known security vulnerabilities.
My web hosting nightmare is customers like you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Security is always important, but so is the user experience. I would love to only allow users to select from known good preinstalled scripts. But is that realistic? No.... I would love to run PHP in safe mode by default, but then I get plenty of customers jumping ship because their scripts no longer work.
The point is ignorant users are going to cause problems. Hopefully only to their accounts, but often enough those problems extend to everyone on a shared (read cheap) server.
If you buy cheap hosting, you get cheap hosting. Do not expect a hosting company to bend over backwards for $5
You install a poorly written script...Then your site gets hacked. Popular scripts make popular targets. How hard would it have been to do a google search BEFORE installing? another tip, get the script from the original author or official site. Web scripts are usually patched quickly, but often old versions hang around on mirrors and software search sites.
In this case, how much do you think your little screw up cost the hosting company? Did you ever stop to think that your mistake probably cost the company more $$$ than they will ever see from you?
Hosting company at a MINIMUM pays for:
1. The wasted bandwidth your error caused.
2. The administrators time to stop the problem.
3. The technical support persons time to deal with you.
4. The administrative time it takes to collect the files and cover their asses, in case law enforcement becomes involved.
5. The admin and support time it takes to deal with the numerous complaints that will flood them. Likely they heard from end users pissed off that they got spam/malware that originated from their IP range. They probably also had to answer to their upstream providers, and give them detailed evidence that the problem has been dealt with.
So your little error has cost the hosting company, in an best case scenario, hundreds of dollars by the time you add up the hourly costs for the administrator(s), technical support, the BW, storage and other overhead.
So how much did you pay them for hosting your site? $5 a month? $10 a month? You will probably move on to the next $2.50/month hosting offer you find, long before they recover the cost of your blunder.
Like, I said I deal with this situation regularly, it is not pleasant for anyone involved. It really is a lot easier (and cheaper) for you to install a copy of PHPMYADMIN and backup your database, and download your web site. Than it is for a hosting company to commit resources to holding your hand through every technical blunder you make.
If your data is important it is ultimately your responsibility that the data is taken care of, not your hosting company, not your ISP, not the maker of your PC or of your hard drive. If your data gets lost it is YOUR problem.
Yes, there are slime ball hosting companies (I personally hate them because they tend to make customers pretty paranoid, but at least their shittyness provides me with additional business). But customers need to understand that they have responsibilities and obligations too. Otherwise the hosting experience isn't likely to be a good one for anyone involved.
-Ms2k
Re:My web hosting nightmare is customers like you. (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate to say this, but it's also rarely the end of the world if a website goes down for even a day or two, let alone an hour, yet people panic because they feel out of control when technology such as a website suddenly "breaks", and that out of control feeling causes people to act like it's the end of the world. That's a natural response, but the fact is, if it _is_ the end of the world if your site goes down, then you should probably be thinking of redundancy at this point. If you can't afford such a level of service, then you're not making enough to cover the required overhead of running your business, meaning your business isn't working out for you.
As a rule, being the support person for a software company myself (lead developer, but answering questions and solving problems is a big part of my job), I try to be courteous to all support staff, and to only call on them when there's a real problem I've verified lies on their end of things. This has usually resulted in me receiving very good customer service. I have had a few bad incidents with one slimey mass-hosting provider, but you live and learn.
Re:My web hosting nightmare is customers like you. (Score:2)
There have been plenty of holes in PHP asfemode
SuExec is your friend
Re:My web hosting nightmare is customers like you. (Score:2)
Cpanel takes care of most of it automatically though. There's also mod_security which stops a lot of problems.
Re:My web hosting nightmare is customers like you. (Score:2)
Pain is your stock in trade, that's what they pay you for !
It was "kind of a pain" to buy, build the shed for and install our 20kw generator but data security is kind of important.
Re:My web hosting nightmare is customers like you. (Score:2)
Re:My web hosting nightmare is customers like you. (Score:2)
Re:My web hosting nightmare is customers like you. (Score:2)
In the end though, they're still your customers, and in the case of a screwup like the submitter described you either kick 'm off your service or try to help and (hopefully) educate them.
I don't see why the hosting company involved (which isn't named, btw) isn't dealing with this properly. Either they should tell Tim that they unilaterally break their contract according to whatever terms both parties have agreed to or work with Tim as a customer to get hi
Re:My web hosting nightmare is customers like you. (Score:2)
Yep... budget hosting (Score:3, Interesting)
Then, the big bomb hit. I know that SSH shell access isn't absolutely necessary to run a simple website, but I needed to run a few programs (ImageMagick and the like) and do some testing, management, and the like through a shell. When my shell access started coming up "denied", I started to get angry. Since letters addressed with ALL CAPITAL THREATS OF CUSTOMER LOSS OR RETRIBUTION, triple-CCed to "sales", "service", and "support" seemed to be the only thing that got through (trust me, I tried politer methods first), I sent off my trouble and heard back that "These features have been turned off because the server got hacked." These services were the ones listed in the product description... the ones that got me to buy in in the first place.
Well, long story short, I ended up transferring the domain (with excellent assistance by DotRegistrar [dotreg.com], whom I still use). It was a bit of a hassle, since I'd stupidly abandoned the contact email for the domain name, but I got it worked out. Then, as a final goodbye, my site was unceremoniously terminated, not honoring the 99% uptime guarantee that should have given me a free month.
After some further research, I found out that the site has been noted for shoddy service and poor support, and "Derek" of Superuser has even been known to vigorously argue with folks, on other web sites and boards, who disparage the service.
From there, though, I stayed with DotRegistrar [dotreg.com] for the domain name. This was the company that Superuser used, but they were unaffiliated and quite helpful in recovering my domain name. For webspace, I went with Just-hosting [just-hosting.com]. They're another budget shared-host setup, and I have had the not-unexpected shared-host downtimes every so often, but their technical support is quite good, they get it up and running... and often even relay what the problem was... and they were willing to accomadate my needs for extra domains, an alternate SMTP port (since my ISP blocks port 25), and working with me through the weirdness that some of my setups cause.
So, just to retierate-- Superuser.net: evil. Just-hosting.com and DotReg.com: recommended.
Pipex (Score:2)
You sign up with Pipex but end up at Bob's Local Hosting
I inherited the account when I changed jobs
It runs
Linux version 2.2.16C37_III (root@kbuild.sfbay.sun.com) (gcc version egcs-2.91.66 19990314/Linux (egcs-1.1.2 release)) #1 Sat Apr 12 14:54:32 PDT 2003
With some sort of Cobalt Control Panel
I said to myself : I bet this box is a bit vulnerable
and decided to back it up straight away so did a scp -r /
watched it tick aw
Re:Pipex (Score:1)
I've been told recently by one of their 'customer care' (teehee) that I mustn't criticise them in my blog otherwise 'action will be taken against my domain'. The rest of their communications have been heavily influenced by Dilbert too.
It's notable that Pipex are in fact GMX Communications who have adopted the Pipex 'brand' but not (apparently) the Pipex ethos.
I've already dumped the
Siteburg.com: A great option. (Score:1)
I've never had any trouble, and have, therefore, never needed to contact them. My worst ever problem was a slight bit of downtime once, during the night, and a slight slowdown at ra
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (Score:1)
Re:NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (Score:2)
Re:Don't even get me started.. (Score:1)
"Plain Old Text" vs "HTML Formatted" (Score:1)
The mis-named "Plain Old Text" setting recognizes everything that "HTML Formatted" does, and in addition adds <br> to the ends of lines.
Also, the "Preview" button lets you preview your post before you actually submit it.
Re:Don't even get me started.. (Score:2)
Re:Don't even get me started.. (Score:2)
Re:Don't even get me started.. (Score:1)
CSoft.com was my previous host, where they a) converted from Linux to BSD without telling us, b) screwed up the upgrade to the new version of berkeley db, c) were supposedly running in "compatibility mode" (and claimed that it was fine, not a violation of their advertised linux servers.) Csoft rendered my blog useless (literally -- I couldn't log in to my own stuff).
Dreamhost was a welcome change. When we signed up we could host up to 15 ful
Even when the ISP does 'backups' (Score:1)
It's been my experience that anyone who hosts a website, particularly on someone else's equipment, that they should keep a current copy/backup of all of their data. This is especially true for those who rest confidently in their hosting provider doing backups for them.
The reason I say this is multifold:
CIHost (Score:2)
I'm hosting with Dreamhost now. They're one of the best hosting companies I've ever dealt with. I'd strongly recommend them.
ultimatehost (Score:2)
Re:ultimatehost (Score:2)
At $40/mo for my own box, I was expecting a fairly high level of service
I hope you realise how clueless that sentence makes you sound? $40 a month for a dedicated leased box puts you firmly in the "budget customer with little to spend" category. When you are paying ~£350.00 p/box p/month with places like Rackspace (last time I checked), then you can expect a high level of service (unless you run an indymedia site, then you're screwed whichever way you turn). True, the company shouldn't offer suc
Please identify (Score:2)
Hiway (Score:2)
In '99, I was doing some freelance work for an ecommerce project, and it was hosted at hiway. Right after launch (meaning after the site owner had spent thousands on marketing/mailing/promotion/etc) hiway suspended the site for 'resource abuse'. What???
"CPU usage is too high".
That's about all we got - for a week. I had some loon on the phone telling me to rewrite my queries because doing "Select *" f
Bargainhost.co.uk (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Bargainhost.co.uk (Score:2)
Getting to my CGI Scripts (Score:1)
I was robbed (Score:1)
Not my own experience, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Part of my company's Information Security work is monitoring reported defacements of websites under various domains (such as .au). Through this work, we have seen numerous cases where ISPs ignore complaints from their customers about their sites being hacked, ISPs having every single customer site hacked at the same time (and still ignoring customer complaints), ISPs where a commitment to action means some time in the next month or so, and ISPs where their lead technical people have trouble understanding their own technology.
By a strange coincidence, or maybe not, the troublesome ISPs are those that also accuse us of hacking their customers, threatening us and generally abusing us for providing a report of an identified defacement. The abuse from ISPs and technical contacts has gotten so bad that we no longer report every defacement that we otherwise would have. Now we only report significant cases (such as complete server compromises or sites which may have sensitive information accessible).
My worst web hosting experience (Score:3)
My worst webhost. (Score:1)
Faradic (Score:2)
Then a harvester bot came across that page looking for bites. It slurped up every email address on the page. This harvester, as it turned out, was used by someone who tries to sell you page ranking services (or some
Hypermart is the worst webhost ever (Score:1)
"It has been a rough week!
My previous webhost, hypermart, deleted the website march 1st. They claimed i was hosting Pirated Software, Serial keys, and/or Copyrighted Software. I sent repeated emails to them and even called them telling them that their reasons were simply incorrect, i cant pir
Registerfly SUCKS (Score:2)
!!!! NEVER USE REGISTERFLY !!!!
!!!! NEVER USE REGISTERFLY !!!!
!!!! NEVER USE REGISTERFLY !!!!
They are NOT accredited by ICANN! http://www.internic.net/alpha.html [internic.net]
They do NOT have any phone support!
They do NOT have any escelation procedures for problems that continue to go unresolved.
Their servers go down for DAYS at a time!
My problems with RegisterFly are not isolated incidents or one-time goof-ups. The NUMEROUS and MAJOR problems I have encountered are symptoms of a completely
1 for me, 1 for another (Score:1)
Name of the hosting company (Score:1)
As requested the name of the hosting company that ripped me off was Acenet. [ace-host.net] Stay away at all possible costs!
Today I'm using Dreamhost [dreamhost.com] - I highly recommend them. To help ease your switch in I offer the promotional code bigmoney, which saves 90 dollars on yearly plans, and 40, 50, 70, and 90 dollars respectivley on every tier of the monthly plans.
Cheers,
Tim
CiHost, circa 2000 (Score:2)
Once upon a time I had one of my sites hosted at CiHost. During the summer of 2000 (I think). I had always thought it odd that their two DNS servers at the time were both on the same subnet, but thought nothing of it.
Until the cache on one of them got corrupted, propogated to the other, and restoring a backup failed. This ultimately resulted in all of the sites (tens of thousands, maybe more) they hosted being unreachable for 30 days.
I switched somethere else ASAP. I still get meil from them offering
Oktagone and their NYC datacenter disaster (Score:2)
First, I ordered a second drive for the machine, which never got installed.
Second, I got double charged for the CPanel installation/subscription.
Third, Oktagone was globally DDoS'd numerous times and it seems that nothing was done about it.
That was while everything was still sort of OK, We were getting a decent deal and gener
featureprice.com = worst ever! (Score:1)
But, they were a shady company; at one point my site went down entirely for a few days; no one in tech was available or picking up or responding to emails. About a week later I recieved an email titled "Explanation email". It detaile
trying to run a good hosting company (Score:2)
I just sit back and LAUGH at all you idiots who lost data to crappy hosting companies.
Good hosting companies were out there, you just weren't willing to PAY for them. And it eventually led to many of them laying off a lot of
Registerfly Sucks! (Score:1)