OT: Web Hosting and the trouble with Spammers

[Andre Garzia]

Derek,

I can't belive a hosting company has trouble detecting which user is
abusing the sendmail program... bad bad support crew.

cheers
andre

On 10/23/07, Derek Bump <list at dreamscapesoftware.com> wrote:
> For the past few months my web site has been going down frequently.
> When I noticed the constant outages, I wrote a program in Revolution to
> monitor my site.  It would check my site every minute, keep a log, and
> notify me via TXT Messaging when the site was down.
>
> This was also very useful to my Father, as he hosted numerous web sites
> with the same provider.  Not only did I monitor my site, but I also
> monitored his.
>
> We contacted our hosting provider at that time, and they said the
> outages were due to "a bug in the firewall".  They also said that the
> firewall would be "fixed by next week".  That was in August, and the
> outages only got worse.
>
> Through September worked my monitoring software even more to take care
> of bugs and other errors.  I eventually took an old 333 Mhz PC and
> loaded my monitoring software on it.  It now sits behind me, monitoring
> all of our web sites 24/7, sending out notifications when necessary.
> Works wonderfully!
>
> Then October happened.  The entire server went down for hours instead of
> minutes.  That's over 120 domains with about 30 active shopping carts.
>
> After numerous trouble tickets with support over the course of a week I
> moved my site to a new server.  My father hung in there, hoping to avoid
> having to move 119 domains.
>
> The troubled provider was now saying that the outages were due to "our
> overuse of the Sendmail program" and that we would have to upgrade for
> $40 more a month to resolve the problem.  According to server logs, our
> use of Sendmail for the last 12 months was less than half as much as it
> was for the year before that.
>
> With an explanation like that, we couldn't help but wonder if someone
> else on the server was over-using Sendmail.  Our providers response was
> the "as we told you before..." kind of message.
>
> So my site was finally back online around October 8th.  My online store,
> however, wouldn't work with the new host (encrypted/hard-coded).  I
> decided to try out my own PHP based store, but later decided against it
> as it was too far away from being and complete store.
>
> I then started searching for a cart/store that was cookie-less, simple,
> and was compatible with GnuPG.  I eventually found one, and around the
> 19th of October I was up and running again.  Well, almost, it took about
> a week before the orders started coming in.
>
> At the beginning of this week I started helping my father move his
> domain names to the provider I am now using.  We've moved about 40 so
> far, and I've completed replacing 3 online stores.  The new provider is
> wonderful.  Free PHP Module Installation, Secure SSL, Excellent
> Technical Support (seriously!), and they're 1/2 the price of the old
> provider.
>
> Today we received a message from our old provider explaining the cause
> of the outages.  Apparently someone *else* on the server is SPAMMING,
> and the amount of spam is taking down the server.  Who would have
> thought?!  It only took them 3 months to figure that one out.
>
> No matter though, we already decided that it was time to give another
> company the chance to host our sites.
>
>
>
> Derek Bump
> Dreamscape Software
> http://www.dreamscapesoftware.com
>
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http://www.andregarzia.com All We Do Is Code.