While an anonymous hacker took credit for taking down web host GoDaddy earlier this week, the company says that the outage was their own darn fault. It wasn’t a hack or distributed denial of service attack, but “internal network events that corrupted router data tables.” More relevant to this site’s interests is that they offered a small refund to affected customers, but only those who took the time to click on a link in an e-mail explaining and apologizing for the outage. [More]
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Cox Ends Free Web Pages For Internet Service Customers
By 11.4.11
It’s understandable for a company to end a free service for customers when it’s little-used. But even if that was the case when Cox Communications decided to stop offering free personal Web hosting for its Internet service customers next month, it might have been helpful for them to give a heads up to their technical support employees. Or maybe that was just the person reader John happened to reach when he called about the transition. [More]
Verizon Takes Away FTP Access, Charges For It
By 8.26.11
Star commenter GitEmSteveDave contacted me this morning with a relatively minor but still irritating problem: he didn’t have FTP access to his webspace anymore. While all customers with Verizon as their Internet service provider have a small amount of storage space to put an entire web page or just a few files online, they can now only access that space through a web-based site-builder tool. The change is supposedly for “security” reasons, but somehow security is no longer a concern if you pay Verizon an extra six bucks per month. [More]
Flee Geocities Before It Closes Forever
By 10.24.09
Before Blogspot and Wordpress, and even before Google, there was Geocities. But no more. If you have files or content stored on Yahoo’s GeoCities service, be sure to back up or move or it by Monday. That’s when the service, an early free web host and nerd training ground, closes down forever. It’s like part of my lonely, geeky adolescence is about to die.
UPDATE: Additional Information On $5,700 Bandwidth Overage Story
By 5.26.09
Last week, we brought you the story of Mick, whose dedicated server was compromised and he was hit with $5700 in bandwidth charges. Many readers, especially those working in the field, had questions about the particulars of his plan and contract with the Web host. The company, Servepath, contacted us with those details, as well as some crucial background information.
Host Monster Turns On Customer, Shuts Down Blog Without Warning Or Sensical Explanation
By 5.11.09
Web hosting company Host Monster only has so many SQLs to hand out to people, and can’t go around passing them out willy-nilly. Why, there are probably websites in Africa that don’t have any SQLs. We’re not really sure what “SQL” is but we think it’s used to store blog entries; whatever it is, Joe Posnanski used too much of it. The Kansas City Star/Sports Illustrated reporter upgraded his hosting package a few months ago and was assured by Host Monster that there’d be no problems as his professional blog drew more traffic. “No problems,” except that last Friday they permanently closed his account without warning.
Watch Your Mouth On Yahoo! Answers Or They'll Delete Your Email And Website
By 4.12.07
Reader Andrew has been a Yahoo! email paid subscriber for 8 years. He also has a Yahoo! Small Business account for his website and has a paid Flickr account. He also participates in Yahoo! Answers. Sadly, Andrew said something on Yahoo! Answers that Yahoo! feels violated their TOS. The result? They deleted Andrew’s entire account, including his email, Flickr, and website hosting. He was given no warning. Yahoo! says his account was “suspended.” Andrew writes:
Now, lets have a quick look at that word – suspended. If a student get suspended from school that usually means they are back within a few days or a week or so. Yahoo!’s definition of suspended means removed permanently. This included all emails I had saved over the last eight years, my pre-paid Yahoo! Small Business Account, my FLICKR account, IM account – the lot. To top it off, and here is the sweet bit, even though I OWN the domain name transformertattoo.com I cannot move it to another hosting service because the contact email address, yup, you guessed it, was my deleted Yahoo! email address. “
Andrew says this is happening to quite a few people who say something untoward on Yahoo! answers (according to Andrew they claim he said something about harming animals, which he denies, but who knows.) Even if Andrew did say something out-of-line, should that affect other services he’s paid for? Andrew claims Yahoo! will not reinstate his account or refund his money. Read his letter inside.
VistaPages Must Really Hate Having Customers
By 6.19.06
Surprise, surprise, Anne wasn’t the only customer VistaPages managed to piss off.
