For two days now I have been trying to update a clients site. His hosting company(who will remain anonymous for now) has allocated his account 250 megabytes. But when the sites files total 27.3 megabytes, the transfers stop and we get the error “552 Transfer aborted. Disk quota exceeded”. I emailed customer services on Monday and received one of those scripted generic responses. I’m not even sure its a real person responding to the problem. Hell, I’m not even sure there are real people working there at all, as it seems they use some outdated control panel that still relies on Site builder. Who uses Site builder any more? Anyway, I emailed them 2 more times, each time getting the a very similar response, but from a different person. “We escalated it to the second level engineer…blah blahblah… please be patient and we will get back to you… blah blahblah”.
I have dealt with people like that before at my last host company, iPower. I mentioned them because they are one of if not the worst hosting companies I have ever dealt with. My clients host company is quickly coming in second in that category, ready to knock out GoDaddy as the number two worst host I have dealt with so far. GoDaddy isn’t as bad for down time or anything(although when they are down, they take their sweet old time fixing things), but their customer service is horrid and their knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes to make a web site is just a joke. Their default response is change your password whenever a site gets defaced or pwned. Their security is very lax, and all it takes is a few lines of PHP and you can traverse their intranet for all shared hosts on their vhost services. Yeah. Not good. Have an upload script, better filter out php files. Oh, and if they manage to use a file like somfile.php.jpg when uploading it to a GoDaddy domain, 9 times out of 10, it will still execute the jpg as PHP code, giving them full access to the site, with the potential to break out of the vhost and onto the intranet. I’ve seen it happen to a client and witnessed it first hand. Their fix, “change your password, as someone must have guessed it to deface your site”.
Hosting companies come and go, and mostly because they use automated scripts while working as “re-sellers” and not as top-domain hosting companies. They often are sublets of the parent company, where any Joe Shmoe can come in and sell you a website, only to find out there is no customer service, their is no tech support, and billing is usually some subcontracted phone support in a third world country where thy resell your info to the highest bidder. Yeah, never got spam before you opened that domain of yours, how do you think they got your email address.
Luckily for me, I moved to Dreamhost. I have to say, even when they have their downtimes, its nothing like the horror stories I have seen with other hosting companies. Dreamhost is also the most secure I have seen so far. I’m not saying you can’t hack a Dreamhost site, but most likely its due to human error by the web designer or programmer working on the site, and not so much a problem with the Dreamhost servers themselves.
Any horror stories of your own? Comment on this post and let me know, “What hosts you like the most, what ones should people stay away from?”