The Four Web Hosts of the Apocalypse (almost)

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about bad web hosts. There are a lot of them and I ended up thinking back to my bad experiences, here are a few of those. Enjoy but please don’t have nightmares!

Infinology

When I bought my first domain name this is where I went. An American based hosting company that was affordable for me at the time and I thought it would be a great place to start, and it was! For a while…

What once was a good deal soon became sub-par and I realised it was time to upgrade and choose a host on the same continent. I’d sent a couple of e-mails to their support over about a period of few months on various problems and had no reply; They weren’t important so I let it slide. Without warning I got hit with a charge for a years hosting (which I wasn’t expecting but should have seen coming), I sent an e-mail to support to plead for a refund but again no reply came so I decided to do some digging.

I soon found that the user support forum was flooded with people who not only couldn’t get hold of anyone but also had trouble canceling their accounts. It felt like we’d all been falsely imprisoned and the guards had all just left. Our domains were trapped and it wasn’t until one of our counterparts found a hidden domain control panel that we all managed to get control back and jump make our breaks for it leaving some false payment details in the control panel so we couldn’t be re-billed.

A couple of months after we all broke free I got an e-mail from a gentleman who had bought out the company (poor sod). He was a very nice bloke who listened to my problems and apologised, he seemed so full of hope for his new company and hoped one day I’d return (although didn’t give me my money back). I wondered if Infinology were still going, whether the gentleman had made a go of it and transformed it into some kind of Garden of Eden of hosting, I took a look and it hasn’t changed a bit. I mean not one bit, it’s exactly the same! The hosting packages, the template, the bad gifs…

Conclusion: You can’t polish a turd but at least you can tell they know it and haven’t tried.

Webfusion

This was once a really great hosting company, then they got bought out by Pipex and it all went down hill. I’m not just talking slower speeds, degrading services and David Hasselhoff adverts either (of which you can relive the horror of below).

The last of the sites under my control left web fusion last year after a huge… HUGE security problem. Basically the site I was looking after aquired a mysterious set of spam links in the code hidden to the viewer with a bit of CSS. First thing I did was check my offline code, it was clean, so I  turned around to the eCommerce platform developers whose software I was using and pointed the finger at what must have been insecure code. They sent me a very calm e-mail back basically saying “We’ve checked and we can honestly say its not us, we thought it might be but thankfully… take a look at this”. If you searched Google for those patterns of spam links there were a ton of them unrelated to the software that was being used.

They went further to point out if you trace back all those sites to a host 9 out of 10 arrived back to the same host. I checked the sites of people I knew who hosted there, the same links hidden in the code. Webfusion had been hacked big time and all they said to my support tickets was “It’s your fault you must have had a virus and leaked your password, change it”. I changed it and hoped the worst was over but it wasn’t, the links were back in a matter of days. This was really bad for the sites business for many reasons and I shut down the site until I moved the host. If you can add spam links you can hijack payment processes and I wasn’t prepared to risk it.

For a significant while no announcement was made on this problem. I would have respected them to tell the truth but all I saw of this problem was a message saying “We’ve changed your password because it’s not compatible with our system change”. Which actually meant “All your passwords were stolen but we’re going to pass this off as a system upgrade”. The fact that a changed password was still bypassed with ease meant there was something on going, maybe even someone on the inside, especially when you saw the scale of its effect and its automation.

Conclusion: This could have caused big trouble if used for means beyond spamming. A little honesty might have stung but transparency would have kept me with them. Mistakes happen, just admit it and fix it… Just stop the lies!

Fasthosts

This one I’ll keep short because we all know… or at least anyone with any real online experience knows. Overpriced and unreliable, here is my favourite example of how bad they are. This story is one I followed over Twitter recently, one of many in fact. Just search for fasthosts and you’ll see.

One of their customers who hires a dedicated server had it go down for three days. That’s bad for business, Google will look at you like you’ve followed through, your clients will think you’ve skipped the country because your e-mail is bouncing and the stress of dealing with Fasthost’s support will age you 30 years in less then a day.

On the third day of calling up support they had finally made a breakthrough. The problem? Now this one is a tough one to fix. The server was switched off! They had a power cut three days previous and no one had switched it back on. When support can’t identify an off machine in less then 12 hours (being generous) it’s time to find a new host, especially when your forking out upwards of £70 a month. Don’t get me started on why this shouldn’t happen in a data centre.

Conclusion: Keep on spreading the word on these guys. It’s hard for people to miss a bad reputation this colossal but it still happens.

Legend Communications

One of the first sites I took charge of was hosted by a small internet provider just across the road from the sites owners. You used to dial into them when they were Bedford’s best (and maybe only host back then) host KBNet. These guys got bought out, then the guys that bought them got bought out and we ended up being hosted with Legend. Check this out for an awesome hosting package:

• 1 catch all e-mail account
• 50mb hosting
• No MySQL (Sold at £50 a year extra if I remember rightly)
• No control panel (not that there was anything to warrant needing one)

That was it… the grand total? £117.50 a year.

I rang them up and asked them if this was right and they told me it was. I told them that was silly and you could get better for free and they told me “That’s what your contract outlines, that’s what you chose and that’s what you have” to which I replied “It’s not my contract, I didn’t choose it and your taking the…”. If you ever have the displeasure of calling these guys and speak to a Martin, ask how long he’s been there. If it’s more then four years, ask for someone else.

I worked my way through various customer “care” employees before I finally found one that stopped trying to make out it wasn’t a comedically high price for so little. As it turned out we were meant to have a control panel so after reciting chunks of the Sales of Goods act they refunded in full and helped us move our domain elsewhere.

Conclusion: Arrogant and unhelpful staff, bad deals and they bought out my favorite ISP Demon a while after. I have since moved to Be Broadband… top ISP.

In finishing…

If your planning on finding a host for the long term do your research, or ask someone who you can trust that has done theirs. It’s easy to spot a bad host, just do a quick Google of there name and an expletive; It will work a charm!

If I had to go back to any of these hosts I’d say Infinology is the clear winner because the website gives me that warm fuzzy feeling of nostalgia just looking at the site. The hosting wasn’t too bad either, it just got sour and now very much stale.

To top my list of never again I’d say Legend Communications take the top spot, I don’t think they were ever set up for hosting and the staff just didn’t get it. As soon as they bought out Demon I jumped ship to BeBroadband who (despite ruining their website design) are in my opinion the best ISP. Really in touch with their customers (actually down the pub with them once a month) but that’s not really on topic. For the record though I’d rather host my own site on an old 9600 modem using a 286 while sitting in the bath with a toaster!

What bad hosting experiences have you guys had? Anyone else out there that was on Infinology when it went bad? Chime in please and don’t forget to follow me on twitter.