Latest Updates
- 3.2.2005: I continue to obtain web service from
DreamHost. They're
a decent web hosting service, although downtime (email, web)
is not uncommon and they recently had a serious overbilling problem.
- 9.6.2004: After losing a day's worth of updates on my
account due to DigiHoster's broken backup system, I finally canceled my DigiHosters account
(as of 9.6.2003 last year). I've since been using
DreamHost for over a year now. I
highly recommend them!
- 8.14.2003: DNS servers for customer accounts magically
became misconfigured. In this case, lookups for
digihosters.com succeed but lookups for www.theether.org
and other accounts all time out. The time I observed
this problem to the time the problem was fixed: 3 hours.
- 8.10.2003: DNS servers for digihosters.com went
completely dead for nearly two days. No email was
sent informing customers what was going on. When DNS lookups for
digihosters.com did start resolving again, DNS lookups for
customer accounts still failed. Multiple emails to
support also went unanswered.
- 7.16.2003: Web statistics have silently died for the
past two days again. From a support email, this apparently is
due to support people manually turning off crond in
response to high load and (i) forgetting to turn crond back on
and (ii) not reexecuting the cron jobs (e.g., web stats
generation) that were missed in the meantime.
- 7.14.2003: Web statistics have silently died for the
past three days. Also, I still have yet to receive a technical
note (as promised) explaining why this continues to happen. I
now have a form letter for reporting this dead web statistics
problem to minimize my time wasted.
- 7.14.2003: The machine hosting theether.org has been
seriously pegged for at least an hour now (although I suspect
probably much longer). Running
top over a few minutes reveals
an endless stream of ncftpput, md5sum, gzip, tar, and cp commands,
running as root. (CPU load graph).
Major Annoyances with DigiHosters Service for www.theether.org
- Silently deleting all email forwarding aliases on more
than one occasion. In each instance, I discovered this only
when friends mentioned sending email to me which I never received.
- Silently deleting MySQL database tables, users, and all associated
data. This has occurred one time thus far and ever since, I've
avoided using their MySQL infrastructure completely for this reason.
- Silently changing permissions on all my files. Apparently,
someone wrote a script to copy all my files to a
new server without preserving the original permissions (e.g.,
breaks CGI).
- Web server crashes fairly often. I really ought to start
tracking this. Sample dead dates: 1.18.2003, 2.1.2003, 2.10.2003,
4.26.2003, 5.27.2003, 7.1.2003.
- Web statistics stop working. This happens frequently and I've
yet to receive a technical explanation. Sample dead dates: 2.7.2003,
2.11.2003, 4.6.2003, 6.25.2003, 7.1.2003, 7.2.2003,
7.12.2003-7.14.2003, 7.15.2003-7.16.2003.
- DNS servers got hacked. Oscillations (for hours) between
www.theether.org as (i) a CNAME to a broken A record and
(ii) an A record pointing to the correct web server.
- DNS servers for digihosters.com and all customer accounts
went dead for nearly two days. No email was sent informing
customers what was going on. Multiple emails to
support also went unanswered. Sample dead dates: 8.9.2003-8.10.2003
(subset of dead time) .
- DNS servers magically become misconfigured. Here, lookups for
digihosters.com succeed but lookups for www.theether.org
and other customer accounts all time out. Sample dates:
8.14.2003.
- Home directory copied to a new machine, but old home directory
still exists as well. No announcement sent out indicating that
files should be updated on a new machine in the future.
- Silently changing ownership on all my files to root. To
be fair, this was likely due to a hasty response to their
servers being hacked.
- Username for my account was changed for no apparent reason.
In the process, MySQL accounts and databases (which were based
on the old names) simply deleted.
- Repeatedly asking for my username/password in plaintext via
email to fix web statistics problems, despite having fixed
the same problems in the past without such information.
- Selectively deciding which questions in support requests
to answer and ignoring all followup requests to address the
remaining questions (e.g., why web stats keep breaking).
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Minor Annoyances with DigiHosters Service for www.theether.org
- SSH server occasionally denies access. This may be due
to sshd being hosed or potentially the machine running out of
resources (e.g., file descriptors).
- Root partition of server out of disk space. Looks like
quotas either broke or weren't implemented properly. "Please ask
your system admin to remove any files not in use on that partition."
- Password for my account for SSH access randomly stopped working.
This occurred after my username changed. Apparently, the hashed
password for my old username wasn't copied over. Sample dates:
12.3.2001, 7.3.2002.
- Providing incorrect information regarding https access for
managing web hosting accounts. "There is no other link for the
WHM other than following..". Probing open ports was enough to find it.
- Multiple processes (ncftpput, md5sum, gzip, etc.), running as
root, pegging the CPU for extended periods of time. Appears to
be either a runaway script or inefficient script design. Sample
dates: 7.14.2003 (top,
CPU load).
Last Updated: Wed Mar 2 02:01:18 PST 2005
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