Proper Procedure When Leaving A Host - Do You "nuke" Your Space
Sep 8, 2007
I'm thinking of consolidating some of our shared hosting and vps accounts into a couple of other vps accounts.
It's just occurred to me that I've never really abandoned a host before and that I have a lot of stuff on there I don't want in the wrong hands.
Sure, hosts should be legally responsible and wipe the space but why trust what you don't know for a fact (I even have one host that had stuff hidden in my "fresh" account, buried in the logs, so apparently they were reusing something along the line as a template).
Should I, and how would I, wipe out the space properly?
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Oct 8, 2008
I am sure this thread was most likely created before but I haven't been able to find anything on the particular host I just had an issue with.
It goes like this.
I've been through web hosts ever since 1998. I've grown accustomed to web hosts deceiving their customers by listing '20 gigs of BW use, or 'Unlimited BW' (which we all know is BS) but for the past few years, I actually had a host who didn't lie about how much BW their customers got with the packages. I signed up for a 20 gig BW account with HostVector and I've used up to 19 gigs and they have never said a single word. I left them recently because they were bought out by Millennium Services and ever since then, its been a nightmare. Constant down time, tech support nowhere to be found. Sadly to say, I had to leave that host due to fact that their new owners have no clue what they are doing.
I found ELIEF and thought they looked promising. I signed up for the package that listed 20 gigs of BW, now at first I thought okay.. this may be fishy, but if this was a flake, they would have specified that customers really won't get 20 gigs of BW.
Regardless, I trusted them the way I trusted HostVector. Seeing how I am a musician, I uploaded a 80MB pack and sent it to some friends to download and not even a 12 hours later. My account was suspended because it apparently caused their server to crash?
I checked the stats and only 68 users downloaded that 80MB file.
This is beyond aggravating. I know there are countless web hosts who lie about this type of stuff but why cant at least specify someplace on their page a more detailed info about bandwidth usage? Maybe put an asterisks next to the BW section like some hosts do and explain that what is listed there is not the reality.
So here I am, my domain is suspended. My fans/listeners/friends are wondering what happened and I am sitting here angered beyond belief because I thought this type of lying was something that hosts stopped doing in the late 90s.
Any recommendation guys? Does an honest web host who actually offers the same amount of BW they list on their hosting packages, exist anywhere?
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Jul 12, 2007
I have two hard disks, and I would like to move all of my MySQL data onto the second drive. My dilema is this; what is the best way to go about doing this? The tutorial I followed last night had me use cp to copy the /var/lib/mysql folder over to the second drive. However, it took ages to move one of my databases. It's a forum hosting database which has tons and tons of tables. It ran for about 5 hours and still didn't finish because I decided to stop it right there. I know it was working; but still, it took forever and I had to put it back up.
What would you do? Do you recommend say, copying just the 'mysql' database that has the users, and then taking a dump of all databases with mysqldump and moving it that way?
Also, is there any way using the cp command to continue what I started last night, but not write a database file if it hasn't chnaged at all?
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Jan 25, 2009
First, while my sites aren't currently on Zone (I have moved them away), it is easy enough to prove I have been a customer, because there a numerous posts on here where Sean and I discuss things, including in the Benchmark thread where he encouraged me to rerun the benchmark after they moved me to one of their faster Dell nodes, about a year ago.
Ok, I am someone that likes to give companies 2nd and 3rd chances and benefits of the doubt. But, I can no longer do that.
About a year ago, or a little over, I needed to move my vBulletin site off of shared hosting, because it was becoming unreliable. Fast one minute, slow the next. After reading lots of reviews and asking questions, I was told I could probably get by with a 384MB or 512MB VPS. At the time, Zone was getting very good reviews and touted as having really fast equipment. So, I took the plunge.
Because I not only didn't want to be memory bound, but also wanted the greatest possible CPU share (not that I needed it, but to make sure I didn't see slow downs caused by other sites like on shared hosting), I went for a 1152MB SLM package.
In the very beginning, things went pretty well, but I wasn't overly pleased with support times when I submitted a ticket. It could be anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours for a response, and then sometimes longer to resolve, BUT whenever they did resolve it they fixed the problem, and as I often asked for an explanation (I was trying to learn how to do some of this stuff on my own), the techs typically gave me a nice overview of what the problem was and how it was fixed.
Bottom line, I wasn't happy with how long it took to respond, but when they did, they were thorough and polite.
In the months that followed (early last year) a few things happened. First, I started to have VPS problems, which was always related to other VPS's on the machine hogging resources. As I had guaranteed RAM and should have as much CPU as anyone (I bought the largest package for this reason), I was told that the Virtuozzo software didn't protect a node from one VPS overloading the I/O, so that was the problem. This started to happen with increased frequency, and two problems occurred in terms of support.
First, since they were slow to respond (now starting to be int he 2-4 hour for initial response time frame), my site would be experiencing high load times and sluggish performance or at times even unreachable, and support would take hours to respond, and then might look at it and say "everything looks fine", and I would have to update the ticket multiple times with load averages from top, before they would finally investigate and say, "another VPS was compromised, but it is fixed now, you shouldn't have anymore problems". The problem was that it took hours for the initial response, which was almost always "we don't see a problem", until I 'proved' there was a problem, then they investigated the other VPS's on the node and addressed it.
Second, many issues they had to "forward to admin". Now, whenever that occurred and Sean worked on it, he was a pleasure to deal with and typically fixed the problem, but it got to the point where it seemed like almost all tickets wound up with "will need to forward to Admin" and Sean apparently was overwhelmed and it cut sit waiting for admin for some time.
Now, at this time I should say that the ONLY reason I hung with Zone as long as I did was because Sean went out of his way to try and help me in every possible way. Gave me his cell phone number, told me to call day or night if there was a problem/down time, etc. He moved my VPS on to a node that didn't have VPS's overloading the I/O and I was very grateful for his support, even if he was addressing problems that were not of my own making.
On a number of occaissions, both on here and via email, I was told how Sean understood about the service problems, and they have done xyz to fix them. I was assured that in
the coming months, I would see a completely different level of service from support. However, the support continued to go down hill.
I just typed a couple more instances, but deleted, because I felt this was getting too long, so lets fast forward.
Ironically, one or two days before zone had that 4 day outage on a node that so much was written about, I emailed Richard Alvarez, who appeared to be the man in charge. I gave him multiple examples of poor support (some he termed embarrassing after investigating) and told him how they had gone from a company with a great rep on WHT, to one that is referred to as having fast servers and horrible support. Anyway, he talked about how they were going to improve and standard stuff, and then bam a day or two later, the node is down. While I wasn't on that node, I was on the node they were using to move nodes off to as they were trying to bring sites up. All those times Zone.net was unreachable, I was unreachable because I was on the same node as Zone's main site.
So, while my node didn't have a hardware problem, for four days, my site was going up and down, and support wasn't responding.
At that point, I couldn't risk my primary site (a Broncos football message board on zone), so I got a leased server from hivelocity (became gunshy of VPS's) and moved my message board to HiVelocity, but left a handful of other sites my second VPS with them in their Miami datacenter. As I had been assured by Richard, and then Sean who resurfaced, that they were going to make major changes and there would be an announcement in a week or two about the changes (this was in November and still nothing), I decided to keep my small sites on the Miami VPS and see if the support improved.
Starting in December, I started getting MYSQL crashes. Apache would still be running, but my wordpress and other DB backed sites would get DB errors. On I believe three occaissions I put in tickets and was told "we have fixed this error, it won't happen again" or something to that effect, and it did.
I was growing tired of the same old support problems, either very long waits for response, or failure to fix problems. Finally, on January 2nd, sql crashed again. I put in a "site down" ticket and waited two hours, and nothing, so i bumped the ticket, then bumped the ticket after 3 1/2 hours, still not even a reply. After 3 1/2 hours, I stated that once the problem was fixed, I wanted an explanation from Sean or Richard as to why a "site is down again" high priority ticket goes 3+ hours without a response.
Bump it again at 4 hours, state I am going to bed and hope it is fixed when I get up.
However, i decide I can't do this, as I have had some tickets go 12 hours with zone without resolution or response, so at this point I post an update to the ticket that after 4 1/2 with no response, I state that i am attempting to restart the VPS and then if it comes up, I will begin moving my sites to another host (to my HiVelocity dedicated).
At the 5 hour mark, I update the ticket and state that I have begun migrating my sites to another host, so please do not mess with the server in any way, and to forward this ticket to Sean and Richard.
Finally 6 hours and 58 minutes after I submitted the ticket and with all the updates I described above, including stating that I have just moved all my sites/cpanel account off of my VPS, I get this response:
Hi,
I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused, the servers Mysql is performing fine and I can access the domain [url]well from my end. The domain broncos07.com is not resolving to the IP and it has DNS problem, you need to contact the name server registrar. If you cannot access the working site [url]then you should be having some network issues on your end. Thank You.
Regards,
Binny E.
ZONE.NET
This sums up how zone support has been for quite some time, and what Richard Alvarez deemed embarrassing (when referring to similar support responses). Binny clearly never even read any of the updates, or possibly didn't understand. It is my belief that Binny and Ravi, seemingly the only guys that address tickets these days, do not fully understand English, as it is the only explanation for some nonsensical responses.
So, now I am fed up. I get a VPS with futurhosting to permanently house the sites I moved to my dedi on a temp basis. I move them over and once all is fine, I put in a ticket with zone to cancel both of my VPS's and also an explanation of why, and ask that Richard and JEffrey (the guys that seem to be in charge) see it. I state do no bill my card again.
I put in the ticket to cancel the VPS's on 1/13, and 48 hours later I get an email stating since I haven't updated it in 48 hours, the ticket has been closed. I go and reply to it, reopening it, and again, get no reply for 48 hours. Bottom line, they have still not replied to my cancellation ticket that I entered on 1/13. Then, I get a bill, I reply to the email (which creates a billing ticket), stating I canceled my VPS, not to charge me. Same thing, the ticket is never answered and is closed after 46 hours.
I don't like to bad mouth companies, but people looking for a VPS provider should know that the support from Zone.net has become horrible. Not only can it take hours (7 on my last "SITE DOWN" critical support ticket), but the quality of the support is also now greatly lacking.
At this time, after 11 days, I can't even get them to acknowledge my support ticket about wanting to cancel both VPS's that I have with them.
I cannot recommend this company to anyone looking for a VPS provider.
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Apr 8, 2014
I have an app that opens a new browser window to a URL that opens a PDF file at a named destination. For example: URL.....I need to authenticate each user that enters this link, but preferably only once per browser session (valid until user closes browser). This authentication process needs to be performed by an oracle-database stored procedure (via a Java servlet, or other technology). Any outline steps or reference link?
The idea would be when the user enters this link, that a popup window appears asking for a username and password, which then get verified by the stored procedure, and then, and only then, the URL address is allowed to proceed.I know I can implement password protection in `.htaccess` as follows.
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Secured Area"
AuthUserFile /path/to/.htpasswd
<Files "myFile.pdf">
Require valid-user
</Files>
But, I need this process to connect to the stored procedure to validate the user, because this stored procedure has to apply business logic to determine the users' subscription status, etc., which can change at any time.
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May 18, 2008
I have done web development for myself for many years and have also launched a very successful video game website. But I have NEVER used what I would consider a proper workflow for developing.
I have never used a test server and never used SVN. All of my work up to now I have done using Dreamweaver and Visual Studio. Using the pitiful source control in dreamweaver (essentially just marks files as read only) and always used a web host I pay for as my platform. Its takes a while to test things as uploading takes a quick second or 2 and I run into problems making test pages and then when it comes time to roll them out to the live version of my site...well...it can get complicated.
I'm taking it upon myself to start learning Ruby along with the Rails framework. And I want to clean up my act a bit. I'm would like yalls advice on how best to set up a better/more professional work flow. I have a number of computers and would like to set one up as a dedicated test platform. I would like to do my development and coding on my windows PC but run the webhost, mySQL server, a mySQL front end, PHP, Ruby, etc on my linux box. Whats the best way to manage this? Is the best way to just ftp them over to the right directories? Or am I totally missing the boat on a much better way to push new code to my test bed? Is there a linux distro of choice out there that comes bundled and set up with all those things pretty much out of the box?
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