Some time between the last week of January to the first 2 weeks of February, my ex web server was hacked. Somehow, a hacker got into my server and decided to use my server to attack another server. My ex web host, ServInt, could not find out who did it or how they did it. Neither could I do anything about it… Lucky for me, the hacker did not seem interested in what I had on my web server as my files were left intact.

It took an extraordinarily long time for ServInt to revive my web server. I believe they were too sloppy dealing with this issue and I got very fed up when they did not answer my technical support queries over one of the weekends. Their sales director later admitted their technical support should have done more to help my situation after I decided to move out of their servers. It was a very sad end to my 1.5 years at ServInt.

I don’t really want to reveal more information about this unfortunate incident because I still believe ServInt is one of the best VPS web hosting companies out there. The problem with them and with a lot of companies in the world is their inflexible company policies. Their support staff were trained to do exactly the way they were told to do and sometimes it can be a problem. Once in a while, something bad will happen to your web server. I had a hard disk crash once and they waived one month from my hosting fees so that was compensated. No complaints about that. For other errors, they seem to take their own sweet time to fix them.

For example, I used to get frequent mail server errors and it prevented me from receiving and sending emails from all of my email accounts. I would email the technical support help desk informing them of this problem and ask them to maybe restart the mail service or find a way to fix it. What usually happens is one of their support staff will reply to me asking for one of my email address’ username and password to test if the mail server is really down. I hate it when this happens because I already told them ALL of them do not work so why do they have to ask me to reveal one of my email account information? Another common situation I received was when my MySQL database service goes down. I used to email them to tell them that the database on XYZ.com is down. What do they do? They reply to me asking for the exact database name. They have access to the web servers and if you look at XYZ.com, you should be able to see that there is only one database. Why do they have to waste their time and mine by emailing me to ask for the database name? I am not sure if I am the only person on this planet that feels irritated. Situations like these really tick me off but they keep doing because it’s their company’s policy.

Their company policy wants them to confirm their customer’s queries at the expense of common sense and a pleasant experience for the customer. Simple tasks that can be solved in one step have now been complicated to two or more steps.

Frankly, my new web host seems to have similar problems with their customer service. If you know of a good web host that does not have irritating customer service, please let me know. I believe it is worth paying more to get that extra piece of mind and save some precious time emailing back and forth dealing with inflexible robotic people like that.

The positive thing that came out of this experience is I know do not take security for granted. You never know when someone might hack into your system. Just recently, WordPress.org was hacked they had to release an emergency update because WordPress 2.1.1 was hacked by a hacker. If it can happen to WordPress.org, it can happen to me and you.

Tagged As: good-web-host, hack, servint, web-host, web-hosting

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