[Hidden-tech] web host problem - advice request

[Hershel Robinson]

I find this thread interesting and actually a bit disturbing. I run a
hosting business and I am surprised at what people said here. Please
read my response until the end. Beware of a bit of a rant at the
end...

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 12:53 AM, Val Nelson <val at valnelson.com> wrote:
> Wondering what you think of this. My web host, Bluehost, has my website on a shared IP. One of the other websites on that server was attacked so now my site has been temporarily moved to a dedicated IP and I have to wait for propagation (anywhere from 4-72 hours-ish) for the site to be found again.

What do I think? I think that's terrible service.

> To make matters worse, they will move it back once they solve the attack and then I'll have that same propagation situation. And they won't promise to do that move back overnight. Hate that.

I think that's more terrible service with no guarantee that they won't
continue to provide terrible service in the future.

> Bluehost claims this is a fairly common occurrence for shared hosting services but not common on any one server. Is this that common? Doesn't sound right to me.

A common occurrence? In my experience, absolutely not. This does
happen with hosts who don't provide good quality service, but I do not
think it's common.

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 3:40 AM,  <dstevens at tryandfindit.com> wrote:
> Seems you will have some more lost time if you move anyway.
> If you do move, you should be able to select the time / date (over a
> long weekend for sure)

I don't understand why moving IP addresses should involve any lost
time whatsoever. If the site is available on both servers during the
transfer period then it should be accessible to all users, worldwide,
at all times. When a person moves to a new home, does he accept that
he will lose his mail for two weeks? Of course not! Why should your
website be unaccessible during a move?

> One last point,
> Changing IP addresses, hosting companies, moving websites, always takes
> longer than 24 to 48 hrs......
> It takes a few days more just to get things to settle down....

It takes from 2 to 48 hours--it should take a few days more. And yes,
2 hours can and does happen, but again the point is that it need NOT
involve any down time whatsoever. We really do have more advanced
technology than that in the year 2010.

> I have always made these kind of moves over a long weekend,
> to give you as much time as possible....
> (even still, I have always had some issues)

As mentioned, I run a hosting business. I have migrated sites
internally to alternate servers (requiring a new IP address) and of
course I have migrated many sites from other hosts to my servers. I
can say with certainty that no internal move has ever resulted in any
issues nor downtime and that the vast majority of migrations from
other hosts also have not resulted in any issues nor downtime.

So long as the site is 100% ready for viewing on both servers and all
email accounts are setup, the transition period can and should be
transparent. Emails which end up at the old server need to be fetched
manually using a web interface, but most hosts provide that. So no
emails should be lost either.

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 4:39 AM, B. Kimo Lee <bklee at azurelink.com> wrote:
> I have a client whose site was offline for more than 2 weeks while the hosting company struggled with cleaning up the affected server. So I think you're pretty lucky to be up.

I honestly can not understand how someone could leave their site
offline for two weeks. For an e-store, even a matter of several hours
can mean a lost sale. For some stores, the profit from that sale (or
sales) could have paid for a month of not a year of inexpensive
hosting. And if the store is offline for even two days, then they
(obviously) just lost more than they thought they were gaining by
using cheap hosting.

For a web dev site, one day can mean a lost new client. For an NPO one
day can mean a lost donor. Either of these losses could represent
literally thousands of dollars if not more. For a site with a proper
backup from another host, I can have a site back online in a matter of
hours. The DNS may take time to propogate, but that should never take
more than 48 hours.

> Intrusions certainly are a risk on shared servers since you can't control what the other site owners are doing. Hopefully Bluehost is keeping up with the necessary server software patches on their end, though they do claim to host over 1 million domains.

Hopefully? Obviously they are not doing a good enough job with
security. I understand that sometimes hackers do get in and that's not
necessarily a sign of a horrible host (certainly not a good one,
however) but a proper host should have backups of their sites and
spare servers and should be able to simply replace a bad server with a
good one. This process should NOT take more than a few hours.

> It sounds like Bluehost has done a reasonable job in the face of difficult
> circumstances, if they promptly diagnosed the problem and moved you out of the way.

I would say this is not "a reasonable job" at all, actually. The OP
didn't mention "promptly diagnosed" but that aside, the OP's site was
offline for a day or two. I don't consider that reasonable at all. And
now that it's online and everything is working and everyone is happy,
now this host wants to take it offline AGAIN for two days to change
it's IP once again? Why? Is she paying for hosting or paying to be
transferred and left offline repeatedly?

What I wanted to communicate in this letter is that what is surprising
and shocking to me is not that there are mediocre and even bad hosts
out there, including some of the big ones. That I am well aware of.
What I am surprised at is how people have become so accustomed to bad
service that they have come to expect it.

To clarify, I am not pointing the finger at anyone on this list AT
ALL, nor intending to say anything negative about anyone here AT ALL,
but I would have expected people to respond with "What?! They took you
offline and want to do it again? That's horrible. Find a new host
ASAP!" Instead people sort of commiserated and confirmed that one
can't really expect to find any better service elsewhere so we might
as well just accept it. I think this is a very unfortunate state of
affairs.

I have been hosting sites since 2006. I have never and would never
take anyone's site offline unless absolutely necessary and on those
occasions when it was necessary, it was never for more than one hour.
I have had to disable sites on occasion and show visitors a "site
disabled" page when we found that hackers had infected a site either
with JS-based viruses or a server-side spam relay etc. In those cases,
we contact the owner immediately and as soon as we can clean the code,
we put the site back online. Every single case of infection, however,
as been traced to a leaked FTP account, NOT to hackers actually
comprising server security. Furthermore, every single case of
infection affected ONLY the compromised site, not anyone else's site.

I don't usually advertise on public forums such as this, but I feel
it's important for people to know that it's not necessary to "settle
for less" with web hosting. My site is here http://civihosting.com/
and I specialize in CiviCRM hosting, but virtually any PHP/MySQL based
tool will run on my servers. I can provide a discounted price to sites
not requiring CiviCRM as well.

I hope I will be forgiven if I ranted more than necessary. :)

Thank you,
Hershel

-- 
http://civihosting.com/
Simply the best in shared hosting