Forum Moderators: phranque
me I would move away from them ASAP
They are working to correct the problem. Their support is appaling as far as this incident is concened. They still haven't answered the problem ticket. On my control panel, the section, "news and alerts" has only two items, both of which are trying to sell me something.
I doubt this will have ever happened to the larger portion of their American customers, or they will have solved in a couple of hours. But the disruption began on a Thursday, then there was Friday and a long weekend since Monday 21 Jan will be Martin Luther King's Day, a holiday in the States, so this leaves a lot to the imagination of the potential duration of the interruption.
Whatever the problem, it has been going on for my sites hosted with them for over 4 days now. They have not answered the tickets I sent as well (all gone fishing? or ski-ing?), and on the phone I had the same reply as you as well as a lot of apologies from a non-US operator, a very decent lady who made a lot of checks and spoke slowly a perfectly comprehensible English.
But the disruption is unacceptable for all the cascading effect it will have, not only economic - all the links from other sites not responding and so on. I re-read the contract with them and there is no liability they accept for this. Therefore I have purchased hosting with a provider in the UK - I read all advise and comments on Webmasterworld to help me decide - to diversify the hosting of some sites in the future, and another .it domain for a site in Italian, which I am having hosted in Italy.
This event is troubling me under another point of view. Is this a casual event, that will probably not happen again, or are we going to see blockades of this massive kind on the internet in the future, and different language websites had better be hosted in the country whose visitors they target, as major companies are doing?
Has this been happening for other countries or continents all the time and I did not just notice?
Will hosting providers block all traffic from specific territories as a cheap measure to avoid spam or hijack when the threat arises? For two years now comcast.net email addresses reject all mail directed at them from Italian IP addresses, also of large providers as tin (Italian telecom) or fastweb and I had to take steps to email my US contacts by webmail using a gmail address.
The ideas / questions you ask about ISPs blocking countries and entire continents as a measure to avoid malicious attacks is fascinating. It sounds feasible to me, maybe likely. What do other people reckon?
The ideas / questions you ask about ISPs blocking countries and entire continents as a measure to avoid malicious attacks is fascinating. It sounds feasible to me, maybe likely. What do other people reckon?
my first thoughts when i read that were about psy ops...
[edited by: WebHostGuru at 12:09 am (utc) on Feb. 18, 2008]
