My site was down for most of the last 3 days. This time the culprit wasn't a scammer in Canada, but my (previous) India-based inefficient, inconsiderate and rude host MySiteSpace.com. It all started saturday morning when I began experiencing problems trying to connect to MySQL dbs on my server. After a couple of support tickets I was told that they were doing "scheduled filesystem checkups". Guess what, I searched their entire site and there was no single mention of even a maintainence schedule, their network status link was actually a script that displayed the current time with a prewritten message: "All Servers Operational". Anyway, soon after, my site went completely down. Then another couple of unreplied support tickets later, my site started going on and off randomly. I tried getting to my blog index page, and I instead got this extension-less page. Voila, all this time these assholes were getting hacked and defaced by some Morocan towelheads, and they weren't even telling their clients the truth.
I tried replacing my index file with a new copy, but it just wouldn't work as if the server was still "locked" by the hackers. Then my site went down again. By this time I had totally lost my cool, and sent in a very critical support ticket to mysitespace. You see defacements occur due to the presense of outdated software for which venurabilities have been discovered. The best webhosts are those that constantly update their software to prevent possible intrusions due to those vunurabilities. Apparently, mysitespace doesn't even come under the 'good' host category. They were, for example, using an 8 month old version of php, ver 4.3.2, which they are still using as of the writing of this review entry.
Anyway, my site was still down, and by now even people on their message boards were getting furious since an entire machine with probably hundreds of accounts was affected. Finally they replied, which a highly scripted message:
Please contact sales@mysitespace.com for the same.So I did what he had said: I asked him the question, again. I asked him where was my site and when would it be fully restored? He replied with the same copy-paste message. I wrote to the Sales dept. (if there is such a thing at this site) and asked them what the hell was going on. They're supposed to have 99% uptime and here my site was done for about 18 hours now. I also noted how 'incompetent' this makes their whole setup look... I mean they get hacked 'n' defaced by a buncha script kiddies who can't even write one correct English sentence. Sales replied,Let me know if you have any more questions.
Piyush,
MySiteSpace Support.
"this is the height of incompetence" -(Notice the two gramatical and spelling mistakes in the above.)
DON'T YOU EVER MAKE THE MISTAKE OF THINK THAT YOU HAVE PAID US ENOUGH TO TOLLERATE YOUR PERSONAL INSULTS. YOUR SERVICE HAS BEEN TERMINATED AND A FULL REFUND ISSUED.
MySiteSpace Sales & Service
As of this moment I haven't received a refund (I'll add an update when I do). I replied back and told them that they cannot terminate my service like this since I had no local copies of my SQL dbs, which had all my blog entries and my templates. They acknowledged and enabled my cPanel account. I downloaded my stuff and told them to delete it from their servers. Done.
And so ended my horrible hosting nightmare with MySiteSpace and began my quest for a better host.
[Update 01/20/04] I just received a refund after cancelling my 'PayPal subscription' with MySiteSpace. That's another red flag btw, a web host that accepts payments through PayPal!
Posted in Web Dev on January 19, 2004 4:57 PMWow - I too just had a horrific experience with MySiteSpace. Shortly after they had charged my credit card for a regular renewal, I discovered that my site was gone, my ID no longer worked, and repeated attempts to contact them (via phone, email, fax) were ignored. Finally I gave up and had to spend an entire weekend setting up with another host - including having to recreate all the databases and populating them as best I could, etc. Then just yesterday I sent a final email to their billing address informing them of my cancellation (although they had obviously cancelled me already on their own!). And incredibly, they responded with a note saying they had cancelled me awhile back due to 'non-payment', that they always try to contact people for 7 days straight if there is a problem, and that they provide 'excellent service - for which they expect payment'! Just unbelievable. Now, it probably was not worth my time to respond anymore to those unprofessional people, but I did - setting them straight with the fact that my card had been charged normally and the mistake was on their end, no one had contacted me or responded to my attempts to contact them, and in fact, an apology from them would be in order! But somehow, I'm not holding my breath.
Posted by: Anonymous at October 20, 2004 2:18 PMhttp://www.haydur.com/logs/mt-tb.cgi/179
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