[thelist] Interland Hosting Update

[the head lemur]

> In my experience 2K is considerably more stable than NT. It might be more
to
> do with the learning curve, they could be having difficulty getting the
> settings right, but 10 months seems a bit of an unlikely timespan for
this.
> Perhaps new admins or manglement have been bought in and they just aren't
as
> good as the previous crew?

HostPro is the New manglement. They also own WIPC, another company that has
a less than sterling reputation.

I had a number of accounts at WIPC that I moved to Interland over two years
ago. Tuesday afternoon I discovered my personal site was pointed to a
password protected directory on another server from a different company
entirely, which began my rant and descent into the bowels of incompetence,
bullshit and outright prevarication.

Yesterday I discovered that one of my clients sites was pointing to a WIPC
netblock because someone at Interland hosed the Zone Files. The zone files
are what translates your.domain.com to an IP address where your site files
reside. This also comprises the DNS record when you do a domain lookup.

This had me on the phone with the NOC and DNS department for 2 hours
straightening out this mess.

Final Score was 13 of 19 accounts were pointed somewhere else.

RE: the learning curve.
On december 31 1999 Interland moved to a bunch of HP servers running
WIN2000. This created the following problems, the time stamps on the servers
were set to Zeros... This hoses CuteFTP which will not return information on
files with zero timestamps.
The Mail servers were unreachable for about 10 days, which made clients
using email cranky.

In April 2000 they "backed-up and Restored" the files on these machines.
they completely lost three of my sites.

This operation also had the effect of password protecting all of my sites,
which in itself is a real accomplishment considering the default allow
everything that Win2000 starts with.

They are also moving everyone to a mail server product called 'webmail'.
Either they are harvesting email addresses and reselling them to every
spammer in the world or they are just incompetent and do not understand what
an open relay is, and how to shut the door.

Case in point: created a page for a domain to be built later and configured
One email address.

17 days later there were 378 emails in this mail account, None of them
addressed to the only receipent.

I have 2 boxes being formatted as I write and am building  Apache
Webservers. I will be doing my own hosting real soon.

the head lemur
Web Standards
http://www.webstandards.org
Evolt
http://www.evolt.org
lemurzone
http://www.lemurzone.com