Tag ix web hosting problems

So yesterday morning I received yet another TOS (terms of service) violation email from my good buddies at IX Web Hosting.  Evidently the participants from the Turkey Trot hitting the GCR web site was too much traffic for my “unlimited” shared hosting plan to handle.  As is always the case when this happens, IX simply turns your site off until you contact them.

So I decide to go through their Romanian online chat tech support instead of dealing with their India based phone help desk.  After waiting close to 30 minutes I finally get someone on the other side and after another 20 minutes my site is finally turned back on after I promised to follow the guidelines the support person sent me via email.

Well I have had years and years of problems with IX including their insecure servers which allowed my sites to be hacked repeatedly, poor reliability and performance, highlighted by the SIX DAY outage when they had a SAN crash, and their brilliant decision to outsource their US based call center to India.  The only way you get to speak to an American now is if you want to buy something from them.  If you have a problem you get to deal with an Indian on the other side of the globe who you will be lucky to understand every third word out of their mouth.

So anyway I finally took some action and although it isn’t a total IX divorce it gets me out from under the threat of TOS bullshit.  I migrated the WordPress sites I use for Dufisthenics and the running club to GoDaddy yesterday.  The plan I bought includes up to 5 WordPress installations so I figured I may as well take advantage of it. I am planning to move the blog you are currently reading there as well once I work out a couple bugs.

The GoDaddy hosting I bought is tailored and optimized for WordPress so I shouldn’t have to deal with the normal shared hosting bullshit I have consumed from IX for so long.  Another barrier to me moving hosts was the hassle in doing so.  GoDaddy can make this process stupidly easy.  You provide them access to your current site and they can duplicate it on their hosting in less than an hour.  It’s awesome.

I am actually using a hybrid approach to this since I already have stuff like domain names, DNS and email bought and paid for on IX which works fine.  I would have to pay extra if I wanted to duplicate that service on GoDaddy.  So I am just leaving that stuff as is and just moving the WordPress installations which will basically eliminate the vast majority of my problems with IX.  It feels good to move away from the source of so many of my cyber-headaches.

After work I bought a small palm sander, another kitchen corner inspired purchase.  Cindy used it last night to do all sorts of smoothing and rounding of edges on the table top.  When she was done the counter top had a distressed look that was sort of cool but the plan is for Cindy to hit it with one more layer of stain before finishing it off with a glaze coat.

I had my hole bit attached to my drill last night to drill two holes, one in the inside of the corner cabinet to access the electrical outlet and a second one on the counter top to route the cords through.

This morning I started my Thursday morning unconventionally with prolonged, laugh out loud inciting videos.  The first was LA Beast swallowing 15 hot dogs without chewing them.

The second video was a hilarious scientific explanation of how to find a wife using careful formulas that utilize a crazy versus hot graph.  It is amazingly funny.

So yesterday I developed an issue with one of my WordPress sites I host with IX webhosting.  When I would try to authenticate to the WordPress dashboard I would be presented with a 403 Forbidden error.  Sometimes a WordPress plug in can cause odd behavior like this so the first thing I did was rename the plug ins directory to eliminate that possibility.  It still threw a 403 error.  Oh well I guess I’ll have to call support.

Any long time blog reader of mine is aware of the many, many issues I have had with IX Webhosting over the years, there are too many to enumerate.  However one thing I actually did like was that their call center was located in Ohio and I could at least speak with somebody that has English as a primary language.  They also have an online chat but that is staffed by Romanians whose communication skills are less than stellar, so I prefer to call in when I have a problem.

So I call the number and am on hold for a very long time, at least 15 minutes.  The reward for my patience was the other line finally being picked up by somebody with a very strong Indian accent on a poor quality line.   Immediately I could feel my blood pressure elevate.  Don’t tell me that IX has outsourced their call center to India…

So as is almost always the case when dealing with an Indian phone representative, the conversation was peppered with lots of “What?”, “Say that again..”, and “Huh?”.  It was frustrating as hell.  The communication barrier and the guys obviously lower level of technical expertise resulted in my problem not being resolved.  I hung up in near disbelief.  After having a four day plus outage several months ago that cost their customers collectively hundreds of thousands of dollars in downtime, they decide to ship phone support to India, something that is is universally seen as a hated practice for customers.  Indian help desks suck, plain and simple.

The move just piled onto the multitude of reasons I should have abandoned IX webhosting years ago.  The ONLY reason I have not bolted is because of the massive amount of work and time that will be required for me to re-home the NINE web sites I house there.  It will be horrible.  It needs to get done however, I can’t continue to reward horrible customer service with my dollars.  I guess I need to start doing some homework.

Cindy has been having some issues with her phone connecting to my in home wifi network.  I found something online about some compatibility issues with my D-link router which is at least 5-6 years old at this point.  I used it as a good reason to refresh my in home wifi network.  I purchased an ASUS RT-AC66U dual band router after reading a number of surprisingly good reviews.  I never bought an ASUS router nor knew they even produced them.  This is the first time I have ever used anything beside a Linksys or D-Link router in my house.

After screen shotting all of the configuration on my old router I shut it down and put the ASUS in place.  Getting the ASUS online had some hurdles to clear and bugs to squash but I had most of it done before we ate dinner.  I like the UI for router, it is easy to navigate and as powerful as you need it to be.  The wireless performance boost was noticeable.  The 54 megabit top speed of my old router is now tripled, Cindy’s laptop was showing a 150 mb wifi connection, sweet.

Tomorrow Cindy and I fly out for PA for my sisters wedding.  It is going to be a very quick hitting visit with our flight back leaving early Monday morning.  I believe it is the first time I am stepping foot in the greater Reading area in at least three years, wow.  The major to do besides the wedding is to see my brother’s new house.  Other than that I will be giving Cindy a whirlwind tour of the area that I used to call home.

Tonight I have to run the dogs back to Ali’s place so they can be picked up by dogsitter number two.  Ali does not return until Saturday sometime.  I then will head home to do a whirlwind packing job followed by hopefully reasonable bedtime since the flight rolls out at a ridiculously early 6AM.

I upgraded my monitors at work from two 19″ 4:3 format screens to two 24″ 16:9 format monitors yesterday. Wow, what a difference.  It is like I have a windshield size view into my cyber-reality.  It’s is pretty f’ing awesome, I have to say.

Last night after work I had a running club board meeting, followed by another meeting.  Despite having double the meetings, we actually finished up in less time than some of our regular meetings go.  After the meeting I headed to South Street with the core drinking crew and had a few beers while harvesting the normal amount of good laughs from the guys.

I didn’t feel like I was an equal opportunity contributor.  I was feeling a bit “locked up” conversationally, probably due to the big full moon.  Not only can the moon send my mood into a tailspin, it can make my speaking more difficult than normal.  Words just don’t want to flow.

So I am having issues with  IX Webhosting again.  On Monday all of my sites were down for close to two hours because of some power outage at their facility, supposedly.  Well then yesterday I get a dreaded TOS email, saying that my websites were once again consuming too many CPU cycles in their shared server environment.  As a result they turned off the biggest consumer of these cycles, the Bar-barians website.

So I called them and got the site turned back on with a promise to look into things on my end.  When I did look at the usage stats for my domains, I was confused.  It looked like the traffic being used was very low, nowhere near enough to consume the amount of CPU cycles they claim I was using.  Since I enabled the Cloudflare service on my busiest domains I have not had any issues with excessive usage due to Cloudflare’s caching and traffic filtering.

I replied back to IX telling them to look at my domain usage stats and that they did not seem to match up with the CPU usage they claim I was utilizing.  I didn’t hear anything back from them.

Then this morning there is another email, they once again killed the domain.  Included with the email were updated usage numbers that sounded absolutely ridiculous:

CPU minutes:

Aug. 20, 2013   825.18
Aug. 19, 2013   1426.28
Aug. 18, 2013   1275.42

For reference, their normal limit for daily CPU usage is 60 minutes.  When I had all my problems back in Feb/Mar when the new site launched I was consuming around 200 CPU minutes at it’s peak.  According to this email I used SEVEN TIMES more than that on Monday, it just made no sense, especially when I reviewed my domain usage stats.

The first number is number of visits, then number of pages, number of total page hits and bandwidth consumed.  For comparison sake, when the site first launched, I had days where the bandwidth used was 5 GIG with 100,000 page views per day.  The traffic now thanks to my efforts with caching, tweaking and implementing Cloudflare is a fraction of what it was.

So anyway, the end result is now I have to trudge through this with them to figure out what is going on.  One guy said something about all requests are not being logged correctly to the stats I am seeing.  He said that almost all of the traffic is coming from hitting the “store” I have on the site which is simply a plug in that connects to the BB Paypal account.  There are not many sales going on so I am not sure where all the hits would be coming from.

Regardless of what the final cause/resolution is, it already has exceeded my daily patience allotment.

I have been talking to my buddy from work who also had tendinitis in both forearms a couple years ago.  He said he got over it by getting physical therapy where the region was massaged and treated with ultrasound.  Well I decided to skip going to and paying for PT by snagging my own ultrasound thingy.  It didn’t cost that much and I paid for it out of the funds from selling my Roomba 535.   I figure it was worth a shot and I have enough aches and pains that I can use it on various body parts.

Yes I sold my Roomba 535.  When these came out in August of 2007, I HAD to have one.  I actually returned a Roomba for Pets model in order to get this.

The 500 series of Roombas had all of these great features on paper like object detectors in the bumper so the unit slows down when approaching obstacles, anti-tangle technology so it wouldn’t get stuck on rugs and cords, modular construction that makes replacement of parts much easier and a vacuum that supposedly was much stronger than the 400 series.  There were a bunch of other improvements as well that made me feel like I just had to get it asap.

Well here is my real world impression after owning a 535 for a year and a half almost, it sucks.  Let me explain.  First of all if you have any ideas of having your 500 series robot coexist with older 400 series robots, forget it.  The 500 is effectively lobotomized when it comes anywhere near the infrared docking station or virtual walls the older models use.  It seems incredibly sensitive to the IR from these devices and as a result refuses to go anywhere close to them and will instead many times just circle in idiotic, worthless patterns.

The IR in the bumper of the unit sounds like a good idea but in reality in normal use it causes more problems than it’s worth.  The plastic in front of the sensors will get scratched over time with normal use.  These scratches can cause the infrared sensors to think that it is constantly approaching a wall which in turn makes the robot crawl at a snail’s pace.

  Anti-tangle technology would be aptly named shitty cleaning performance technology.  Yea the 535 can run over thick pile rugs and cords and not get stuck as often as a 400 series.  However the reason for this is partly because the brushes sit higher up in the robot and make less contact with the floor.  In my environment this has a very undesirable side effect, it does a poor job of picking up animal hair that is lodged in the carpet.  The difference in hair pick up between my 400 series robots and the 535 was staggering. The 400’s did a much better job.

The 535 also seems to be just plain stupid.  It manages to get itself stuck around the house routinely where as my 400’s will typically complete an entire run and successfully dock without issue.  My 535 has NEVER successfully run through a cleaning cycle and docked itself without my intervention.  When it encounters resistance, instead of intelligently turning the opposite direction and driving away, it will plow ahead, wedging itself under the furniture until it can no longer escape.  It also ignores what would seem to be obvious obstacles.  I can’t tell you how many times it has managed to drive right over the wooden base under my recliner and get itself wedged underneath.

One of the new features on this model was supposedly less of a problem with hair getting wrapped around the ends of the brushes which causes premature failure.  Instead, the 535 was absolutely horrible in this regard.  It has far more problems with hair wrapping around the brush ends than my 400 robots with pet brushes. The spinning side brush design on the 500’s is shit as well.  The arms on the brush break off routinely.

So as you can see, at least for me, the Roomba 535 was an utter failure.  I am glad to see it leave my household.  I’ll stick with the 400 series robots until they are no longer available.

So for the past 3 days I have missed calls from IX web hosting regarding my “comment”.  Finally today I got to speak to a “manager” named Kenny.  I briefly stated my issues.  Kenny told me that they actually discovered that they DID have a security problem with their PHPBB configuration on several servers and they were in the process of fixing it.  I then asked him why their tech support people were so clueless and instead just spit out canned responses that blamed the customer? He said that there were some “communication issues” that are being worked on as well. 

Kenny also enlightened me to the lay out of the organization.  Evidently a portion of their help desk operation is located in UKRAINE. (the servers are in Kentucky)  That explained why the majority of the time the people I deal with have names like Vladimir or Dimitry.  I asked Kenny if I could have his last name so I could use it as a reference if the problem reoccurs. “We don’t give out last names” he says. Um ok, so how am I supposed to identify you?  “Just say you talked to Kenny, they will know who that is”  I continued, asking if everyone at IX had fake names, like the people we deal with at the help desk.  He said their names are real.  I guess since they are in the Ukraine it is safe to give out the names since it is far easier to drive to Kentucky to wring a guys neck than flying to Eastern Europe. 

So our conversation ended, I thanked Kenny for following up with the call and that was that.  I was right, they were wrong.  I will be sure to keep this series of events catalogued for any future communications with their help desk.

Back in August I posted about some of the problem I was having with my web host, IX web hosting.  All of my files had been reset to read only as well as having junk code inserted into them.  When I contacted IX they shirked all responsibility for the issue and insisted it must have been because I had a virus or trojan on my PC.

Well that post has evidently been found by various other IX Web Hosting users since I posted it and guess what, they had the exact same thing happen to their accounts.  Of course this meant that IX was full of shit.  The compromise was not isolated to one user’s content, it spanned the server.  It really pisses me off.  In response I sent the following to them as a “comment”.  I hope it gets in front of the higher ups at IX but I highly doubt it will make it past Vladimir or Dimitry…

Back in August I contacted IX after every single file across ALL of my domains had their permissions reset to read only and also had malicious code injected into the end of every single html and php file.  I notified IX of the hack and told them that it happened across all of my domains, not just one.  I suspected there was a server wide compromise that could have allowed the hacker access to all of my domains.

IX help desk staff dismissed any responsibility for the problem.  Instead they pointed the finger back at me, saying the problem was surely because I had a trojan on one of my computers or perhaps one of my software installations was insecure.

I indicated to IX staff that this was highly unlikely since I am a local network administrator and take the necessary precautions to make sure my local pc is not compromised.  Furthermore, the applications I had on IX (WordPress blog and PHPBB3) were up to date with the latest versions.

None of this mattered to IX staff, they refused to look into any sort of problem on their end.  They said that had no other reports of problems on the server. 

Since that initial problem I have had several other incidents where phishing files were dumped into my site as well as some malicious code being injected into my PHPBB3 board.

Again I did some research and contacted PHPBB3 tech support.  They indicated the type of attack pointed to a server wide compromise.  I passed this information to IX support and again asked if they could look IN DEPTH at web237 to see what was going on.

AGAIN I was told I had a trojan or my software was not up to date.  IX refused to accept any responsibility for the hacks.

Well I posted about some of my issues with IX in my blog.  You can view that post here. https://blog.duf.net/?p=1800 (read the first paragraph and the comments from other IX users at the end)

What I discovered were other IX users having the EXACT same compromise that I did, meaning the problems WERE across accounts and not isolated to just mine because of a trojan or virus on my pc.

If IX has any interest in maintaining it’s customer base I suggest a new attitude is taken by their support staff. There ARE issues with security on your shared servers and they are not being addressed by your network admins.

I understand it is far easier to simply point the finger back at your customers instead of making the considerable effort to full investigate these type of issues.  However I would offer that if you have any interest in more of this bad word of mouth not spreading across the internet you may want to stop exclusively blaming your customers for the poor security on your shared servers and take some responsibility for securing your shared hosting services.

I would appreciate it if this comment found it’s way in front of the IX President/CEO.