jrsmith
02-04-2005, 10:23 AM
Part of my website has been hijacked by HR support staff, and they aren't returning my emails.
Late Tuesday night/early Tuesday morning, while browsing the web from link bookmark script I created years ago, my site suddenly started responding very slowly and often timed out. After several minutes of this behavior, I naturally sent a trouble ticket to HR asking if they could look into the problem, and went to bed. It's important to note that the site had been running smoothly for months before this event.
The next morning, I checked my email and saw that a support technician had replied saying the problem was fixed and everything was now working fine. I went to the default page and it came up quickly, but this was just a static HTML page. From there I proceeded to my blog, and the request timed out. I sent another email to HR support, and they again said that the problem had been fixed. I tried again, same result. After a while, my account was suspended. I sent another email asking why, and they informed me that my blog subdomain was getting a "high amount" of visitors and they had to suspend my account because it was causing the server to crash, and suggested that I purchase a dedicated server.
This seemed odd to me. My site is just a personal weblog, with nothing of interest to the internet at large. I had put up a video 2 weeks beforehand that I thought might have gotten linked from somewhere else, so I patiently waited for my account's suspension to be lifted so I could check logs and bandwidth stats. Once I was able to get into my control panel, I saw that I had only used 30-40 megs of bandwidth since the beginning of the month (all of this occurred February 2nd) and my raw logs showed no abnormal traffic. I replied to my trouble ticket with this information and asked what high traffic they had seen that caused the server to crash. They replied with a chunk of my access log that show a lot of requests for images from a strange user agent... but they didn't realize that those requests were coming from MY IP. As in, the IP of the domain that I have hosted with them. My script checks the dimensions of images that are posted to make sure they don't exceed a certain width, but they are all local requests and shouldn't cause a lot of extra bandwidth usage.
I sent a reply saying as much and haven't heard from them since. They blame my code, but my code has not changed for months and has been fairly fast. They ignored me when I pointed out that the only time the problem was occurring was when a script was accessing mysql, and that other scripts that don't were working fine. They ignored me when I said I hadn't changed any of the code in months so there's no way that something just sprung up overnight all by itself on my end. They flat-out ignored me. It's been 2 days and I haven't received a response to any of my multiple emails. They took away my right to access the blog directory on my account, so I can't even perform tests to see what exactly is going on, and they are apparently not willing to do this themselves.
I've been a loyal HR customer for 4 years. I've never had any problem with them, and their support staff has always been helpful. I have 2 accounts with them, and directed my company's director of IT to them to host 6 accounts. But at this point, I'm shopping around, and I'm seeing a lot of better deals out there. The hassle of getting everything set up somewhere else is enough to make me give them another chance, but if I don't hear from them within the next few hours, they've lost my accounts and the accounts of my employer.
JR Smith
Late Tuesday night/early Tuesday morning, while browsing the web from link bookmark script I created years ago, my site suddenly started responding very slowly and often timed out. After several minutes of this behavior, I naturally sent a trouble ticket to HR asking if they could look into the problem, and went to bed. It's important to note that the site had been running smoothly for months before this event.
The next morning, I checked my email and saw that a support technician had replied saying the problem was fixed and everything was now working fine. I went to the default page and it came up quickly, but this was just a static HTML page. From there I proceeded to my blog, and the request timed out. I sent another email to HR support, and they again said that the problem had been fixed. I tried again, same result. After a while, my account was suspended. I sent another email asking why, and they informed me that my blog subdomain was getting a "high amount" of visitors and they had to suspend my account because it was causing the server to crash, and suggested that I purchase a dedicated server.
This seemed odd to me. My site is just a personal weblog, with nothing of interest to the internet at large. I had put up a video 2 weeks beforehand that I thought might have gotten linked from somewhere else, so I patiently waited for my account's suspension to be lifted so I could check logs and bandwidth stats. Once I was able to get into my control panel, I saw that I had only used 30-40 megs of bandwidth since the beginning of the month (all of this occurred February 2nd) and my raw logs showed no abnormal traffic. I replied to my trouble ticket with this information and asked what high traffic they had seen that caused the server to crash. They replied with a chunk of my access log that show a lot of requests for images from a strange user agent... but they didn't realize that those requests were coming from MY IP. As in, the IP of the domain that I have hosted with them. My script checks the dimensions of images that are posted to make sure they don't exceed a certain width, but they are all local requests and shouldn't cause a lot of extra bandwidth usage.
I sent a reply saying as much and haven't heard from them since. They blame my code, but my code has not changed for months and has been fairly fast. They ignored me when I pointed out that the only time the problem was occurring was when a script was accessing mysql, and that other scripts that don't were working fine. They ignored me when I said I hadn't changed any of the code in months so there's no way that something just sprung up overnight all by itself on my end. They flat-out ignored me. It's been 2 days and I haven't received a response to any of my multiple emails. They took away my right to access the blog directory on my account, so I can't even perform tests to see what exactly is going on, and they are apparently not willing to do this themselves.
I've been a loyal HR customer for 4 years. I've never had any problem with them, and their support staff has always been helpful. I have 2 accounts with them, and directed my company's director of IT to them to host 6 accounts. But at this point, I'm shopping around, and I'm seeing a lot of better deals out there. The hassle of getting everything set up somewhere else is enough to make me give them another chance, but if I don't hear from them within the next few hours, they've lost my accounts and the accounts of my employer.
JR Smith