Slashdot Mirror

I'd recommend reading a site like http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ since it has forums dedicated to this kind of question.

Or you could just google for "vps hosting" or "dedicated hosting" and start working through the plethora of results

Here you go. Feel free to scan the hosts in that list to see what OS/Version they are running. Also, read this for some background.

This comment of yours:

you'll be able to provide an extensive list of documented vulnerabilities
 
is absurd. I specifically said 0-day, which implies NO documentation as of yet. There are several groups like the individual linked to at zone-h above that are using suexec'd processes to smash the stack on RHEL kernels and escalate privileges. I do not mean to be an ass, or a troll, but come off of your ivory tower and into the real-world: these tactics are used daily without any documentation other then what we can gleam from logs and conversations with other admins and researchers. God help you if you rely on CERT or some bugtraq list somewhere.

For what it's worth, a group of us on Web Hosting Talk were chatting about the Godaddy problems, and someone from Dynadot came by to support Godaddy and state that they do the same. You can see the start of that here:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=569 379#post4265087

So if you're leaving Godaddy for their interference with domain names, then you surely want to also avoid Dynadot.

Three magic words :

Xen credit scheduling :)

You may be used to Virtuozzo, which does not truly separate a VM's access to memory. I'm not going to go into a bunch of detail about it, as we'd go way off topic.

Denial of service attacks generally result in the shared host's main shared IP needing to be null routed, which means they have to change it.. and you end up waiting 72+ hours for it to propagate before you enjoy the full services you pay for.

An insecure forum hosted by your "neighbor" can give me access to everything in your home directory, easily.

There are golden apples who are somewhat picky about who they'll sell an account .. and they actively watch the servers to make sure they intercept, or at least quickly deal with interruptions.

The point is, you take a major gamble with what (could) be important by purchasing something advertised safe with a 99.9 % uptime guarantee, and sadly .. you lose much more than the SLA says they need to credit you when disruptions occur.

At least host your email on your own box , or a Xen dom-u (VPS), if its important to you. I've worked for some of the larger US hosts, and I can tell you - you're in a sardine can, even if you don't realize it.

Good place to research hosts (and bitch about them) is web hosting talk

One of the better moderated hosting related forums available.

Take a look at unixshell, or someone like them. Its cheap enough to play with for a month .. I think you'll see why I'm saying shared hosting all together is about to become a thing of the past.

As it states, it is BlueQuartz (based on the RaQ550). It is NOT mine. As far as your response about being on http://www.webhostingtalk.com/, or atleast a review. Search for BlueQuartz. You will see a lot of positive feedback on it. The underlaying OS is CentOS v4.3, and it used BlueQuartz for the webgui. But, I did not write the software, just combined the two.

He doesn't want a dedicated server, he wants a managed server that isn't shared typically referred to simply as a "managed server". There are still lots of hosts that do this if you just know what word to use in your search. The word of course being managed.

Anyway, the proper place to ask or research this topic is web hosting talk as the whole site is dedicated to this topic. There are reviews, special deals, etc. Often you get tech support, owners, and other members of the hosting companies themselves posting on those forums.

Though Slashdot does cater to the tech heads, I recommend you check out webhostingtalk.com being it caters exclusively to webhosts and webmasters with a gazillion members. Not only will find the answer to your question but you'll also have a good place to research any hosts hosts - sketchy or otherwise. I'm not affiliated with them, but I've found all my hosts through them. It's a great community. Good luck!

There's a few things you can do:

• Traceroutes. try to trace the route to your prospective hosting provider from as many worldwide locations as you can. traceroute.org is your friend. Look at what carriers they go over, and if those are any good.
• Someone else mentioned it before, but I'll mention it again because it was a very good tip: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ ... Many hosters roam those forums and they're making offers there that you don't normally see. That's where I got my server with 10 mbit flat for just over 100 EUR, and there's also a lot of people talking about their experiences with various hosts. It's probably the best friend you'll have on your quest.
• As far as support is concerned, you have to know what you can do yourself and what you can't. If you can help yourself, you're always better off because you can get a much less expensive server. Support these days is at a premium, especially good one. Also, if you have any choice, don't count on their support. Most companies seem to have completely incompetent tech support stuff these days :( Plus the response times are often dysmal, even if you have to pay extra for it.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ good place to start researching. For me, Pair has always done me good.

First of all, don't go with 'flashy' hosts that try to woo you with their whiz-bang web design unless it's one of the big, well-known hosts. By this, I mean look at their website design. Does it look like a template? The sort that involve stock art pictures of people. If so, stay away.

Second, are the prices absurdly low, or are the figures absurdly high for the price? If so, stay away. (I would also imagine that you want to go for neither the lowest or the highest price you can find.)

Third, you probably don't want to go with one-man webhosts, or hosts run by teenagers. If you can find proof that the webhost is neither, that too makes it a better candidate.

Fourth, yes, WHT is a very good community. You should do a search on any host before choosing them. It's usually the negative reviews, not the positive reviews that really matter. There can be any number of positive reviews for a company, but one negative review can tell you everything the positive ones didn't.

Fifth, what does the host claim, datacentre-wise? You might want to look for hosts that host in GNAC or ThePlanet, or claim to, rather than claiming to (or having) have their own datacenter (unless it's one of the very big hosts). Even if the host does have its own datacentre, ask yourself: is it really likely to live up to the former two?

Sixth, yes, do ask people you know. I don't reccomend Google. Search engines use ranking algorithms, and thusly can and are gamed. People aren't so much.

Seventh, I have heard very good things about ASmallOrange.

Swing by http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ and check them out before putting money down. A really solid community, where SOMEONE will have experiance with any given provider. And many of the members are more on the profesional side of thigns, not what another comment here refered to as "the clueless PHB set".

Your domain name parking/registration is usually done with a different company than the company you choose to be your web host.

Unless you're clueless, then you go with somebody like dreamhost or 1and1 to do everything for you. Good luck moving to a different host down the road.

How's your uptime, btw? Heard it's pretty shitty on the http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ boards. You did the proper research there before choosing 1and1, right?

You can have good sounding speakers, or you can have Bose. You can't have both. Here are a few links for more information:

• The Dumbing Down of Audio
• Placement Suggestions For Cube Speakers
• Ten Biggest Mistakes of Speaker and Home Theater Shopping
• FAQ about Bose home theatre products

Serious audiophile sites/publications ignore Bose equipment completely. Perhaps that is because they refuse to waste their time on stuff they know is junk, or it could be because Bose has been known to deploy lawsuits in response to bad reviews.

This idea is doomed for the same reason that the .xxx top-level domain was...namely, because setting aside a resource for pr0n is tantamount to condoning it on some level,

I'd say first would be not to use enom... when I saw hwlogic.com not showing up I did some research on the "extended RGP" thing and found other people with this problem. Is this legal?

I don't -- I don't have to. But there must be some out there. The internet is an extremely transparent medium, and it is very hard to astroturf your fraudulence out of the public view. If I was looking for a registrar, I'd figure out what the biggest forum was, and browse around there for awhile (perhaps this one? Maybe.) I imagine I'd discover pretty quickly who was and wasn't shady.

take a look here: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threa did=441925 .. the post by slidey is possibly the most useful.

As others have said, WHT is probably your best bet for reviews.

One thing to note about WHT though is that there is a "WHT Level Host" and that level is quite low - what I mean is that a lot of the time WHT attracts those $1/month overselling fly-by-night teenage (or less) managed "hosts" (who are almost certainly kids who bought a $1/month mammothly oversold reseller account) that will ignore support requests when they go on summer holidays with thier parents. Unfortunatly these hosts start out well, and they often get good reviews (probably tooting thier own horn), but very quickly they will die off.

Also make sure you know exactly what you want, ask questions. You're posting here so I'll assume that things like SSH access are important, and if you're using PHP you probably don't want anywhere that has safe_mode restrictions (and probably not open_basedir), you might also want to avoid hosts that run php as suPHP (basically cgi-mode php in a wrapper).

In short, take your time, choose wisely.

It was great to read the 'market for lemons' post. It takes a fair bit of experience in the 'industry' to be able to pick the good hosts from the bad. And unless hosting customers are savvy enough to tell a good host apart from a bad one the good ones will indeed be driven out of the market.

Here is my advice for finding a good host.

• Ignore the 'review sites'. Or at least take them the reviews with a major grain of salt. Most 'review' sites are indeed just paid advertising sites. 'Top Hosts' are typically just the hosts that paid the most for the listing.
• Look for a host with a few years in the business. It means the host has gotten past the first 6 month hurdle were probably 99% of all webhosts just up and disappear (losing money, getting bored of the job, selling out to a bigger outfit, etc). Obviously a new business may be good, but you will improve your odds by picking an older business. In addition to proving themselves survivors they will likely have gotten their procedures and server setups nicely tuned, plus they will have a bit of experience behind them.
• Look for multiple contact details on their site. Phone, email, tickets. Most webhosts will work from home, so you may or not see a physical address (which isn't necessarily bad). A physical (office) address may indicate a larger organisation (which isn't necessarily good).
• Look for forums or some way of users making public comments/questions about a site. It indicates the host has some confidence in their ability. And it is likely you'll see problem reports (quite normal, no need to get alarmed) and how the host deals with them (which is what you should really be interested in). A lack of forums may not indicate a bad host (they could just be shy).
• Google for the prospective host. You'll find people recommending them, or hosted by them. You may find positive/negative comments about the host. As has been mentioned, research them on web hosting talk. Take any comments with a grain of salt: host enough people for long enough and _someone_ is going to be unhappy about how they were treated. Look for common themes in what people are saying about the host.
• If you have the time setup some kind of uptime monitoring on the host. Preferably try to figure out the server they are setting up new customers on. It may not be the same server as their domain.
• Pop in a pre-sales question. Ask a few intelligent questions. See what response you get. The response may be well written or may indicate the author is a l337 h4xor kid trying out the hosting biz. The response should indicate the host knows what they are talking about. Good questions to ask: what do you do about server failures? what network outages have you had? And describe your backup setup. Problems happen, denial could very well be an indication of dishonesty.
• Check their prices. Deals that are too good to be true probably are. Look for middle of the road and up pricing (and be aware that there are plenty of high priced hosts that have pretty bad reputations).
• Check their resource allocations. 'Unlimited' is bad (or rather it is not really possible despite what the host will say). 'Unmetered' is the more honest phrase (it typically mean, when applied to bandwidth that the server is on a fixed bandwidth pipe and you can use as much as you can get. When the bandwidth is maxed out your transfers will just be throttled.

--
Disclaimer: Take all this advice with a grain of salt, since I happen to run a VPS hosting outfit.

http://webhostingtalk.com/

WebHostingTalk.Com

You might want to check out Webhosting Talk and ask about any hosts you are looking at, or search the forums to see what customers of the hosts are saying.

WebHostingTalk.com -- these forums, although owned/sponsored by EV1.net are proven to be full of quality advice and populated by people who usually know what they're doing and whom to order to rent the hardware/bandwidth/services from.

Ask there if you want to get advice from a multitude of people who deal with those decision on a daily basis.

(No, not affiliated w/WHT or EV1).

Once you know what type of web hosting you want it's easy to find hosting company.

But before you decide do hit http://www.webhostingtalk.com and read reviews and customer feedback about your choice.

Good luck

The former webmaster was using frontpage to post stuff and doesn't have a valid control panel login ... The problem is a couple of uears ago, someone registered the domain for 5 years. The person who registered it is long gone, and I can't get ahold of them to change the DNS entries.

Sounds like a class act organization! What's your number in case I get rear-ended?

Transferring the domain should be as easy as initiating a transfer with another registrar (which will usually give tack a year on the existing expiration), assuming you have access to the admin contact in the WHOIS (If not, you'll probably have to contact the current registrar to get it changed to something valid). However, if you're currently hosting your DNS with said provider, you'll also have to transfer your DNS records (probably manually) to the new registrar or to different nameservers. Transerring to a different host should be as easy as signing up and pointing your DNS to their servers, asuming you still have control of your DNS and that hasn't been lost in the shuffle also.

If you want to simplify it all, you might consider transferring everything to a registrar that provides domain registration, DNS hosting, and web hosting (make sure they have PHP and your other requirements). Then you have one contact for support (make sure it's a reputable one though).

Ask for domains, DNS hosting, and web hosting in one package. Look/ask around to make sure they're not some fly-by-night POS. eNom offers domain registration, DNS hosting, and web hosting under one roof, and they've been around forever.

The problem I had was that one day my domain disappeared. I tried to politely go through the correct channels, and found that there was only the online support live chat system (the phone number that I did eventually find only rings an answering machine from which I never received a call back). I was told that my domain was down because they were doing server upgrades.

They were apparently doing server upgrades for over a week.

I had to prove that I had a valid contract and that I had paid for the service. Additionally, they kept trying to tell me that they no longer were in the web hosting service and that my domain was now being run by another company. After contacting the other company, they told me that they had no idea what I was talking about and that it was registerfly who was supposed to be in charge of my domain. Back and forth, big headaches and never a straight answer. Additionally, the live chat service is unbelievably slow (takes them almost 45 minutes to an hour until someone actually types anything) and I had to do this a few times after having my connection dumped well into the wait. After all this, I couldn't get a refund for the remainder of my 1 year contract. Luckily, I had my DNS registration elsewhere, so I just switched to another provider and left.

I don't normally speak about my experiences, but this thread is about reliable ISP and web hosting services. As such, I felt that it was necessary to at least post my experience with this company. I don't know if they've changed in the last several months, but I will say that I have been much happier with 1and1.com so far. The features are better (e.g. sftp VS web based form upload) and feels more professional. Remember, don't judge a company by how glossy the web site is. Do your research; I only discovered after the fact that registerfly has some bad history. Check out Web Hosting Talk or Internet Forum first.

I'd pop over to WebHostingTalk and check out the reviews for any host you're considering.

In general, you can get a pretty good feel for a host by what's been said about them at WHT. Many hosting co's also actively post at WHT, so you can often see what their support staff is like as well.

I am currently using two Web hosting providers, both for Web and e-mail, that I feel I can recommend. That's out of 5-6 hosting providers that I've used total. DreamHost has good plans, almost 99.999% uptime and pretty strong support services. I've been with them for about half a year, and so far have only the best impressions. I sent out a support e-mail once (had some database troubles), and got back a reply within 5 minutes (they don't promise that, but they guarantee a reply within 24 hours). Seems like they have plenty of customers and hence hire dedicated staff for support. Some domains hosted there (if you want to check the traceroute or load speed) - collectorcarbuff.com, thatwasfunny.com.

I've been with VerveHosting for about 5 years, they've been hosting my e-mail and provided Web hosting, the same thing - excellent uptimes and timely support, always got a reply within an hour or so in case I had a problem. Also, several times I needed custom Perl modules for the Web server, and all I had to do is ask. Domain hosted on VerveHosting - moskalyuk.com and hotdealsportal.com.

There are three others which I won't recommend (one happened to give me a 3-day-in-a-row downtime once), but I don't want to mention their names. WebHostingTalk is a great place to look for deals on hosting and read reviews.

From personal experience - I stopped looking for unbeliavably low prices, as those hosters would inevitably be the ones having problems. Good service costs money, and support can be crucial issue, if your site is selling products or selling ads, since every hour of downtime brings lost revenues. The link to DreamHost above is a kickback link (they have an award program for each customer, where the kickback earned goes towards the hosting bill), but other than that I don't profit from the links, and do not work for any of the companies.

Paul Vixie mantains a list of people offering inexpensive 1U colo services. You might start there and then try to search for testimonials or experiences with any that seems like good deals.

You should also check out the advertising forums on WebHostingTalk.com, where you will find many, many good deals on dedicated servers, colo, VPS, shared, etc.

The prices of the service listed in this article are, quite frankly, laughable. Their cheapest plan would be $43/month for a paultry 50GB of traffic. For around $50 to $75 you could get either a full 1Mbit (approx 316GB/month) 1U colo, or you could rent a dedicated server with probably a couple hundred GB metered. And in the latter you don't have to buy a machine.

For the $25 to $50 range get a VDS. You get all the control of a dedicated machine, without the cost. And you could most definitely do a heck of a lot better than a measly 50GB a month for a $40 or $50 VDS.

I just don't understand why you'd want to colo a mac mini. The small, sexy design is meaningless if it's locked in a datacenter, so you might as well just get a standard 1U server and be done with it. You have MANY more options for hosting a 1U or 2U server than some dinky little mac mini. Competition = better deals.

It can actually make a big difference... not so much for transfering (although it is possible that the reseller steal your domain), it's just another layer where something could go wrong.

Also, resellers often have the same power you have over a domain -- they could easily change the admin contact to themselves, for example.

Or, in a recent example, the employee of one reseller decided to delete everyone's domains. The users were forced to either pay some price over $100 to get the domain from redemption or potentially lose the domain (aside from the fact that what they paid for the domain was gone). If you care to read about that, here is a rather long thread on it.

/. is not really the place to ask this question. Try

WebHostingTalk forum instead.

eg.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.ph p?s=&th readid=343281

or
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php ?s=&th readid=335093
or even this thread (crikey, 5TB/month):
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthr ead.php?s=&th readid=342082

I think most unmetered servers will come to $200/mo or so.

eg.
Ev1Servers
Although they're all sold out, you could do worse than contact them and see if they have something for you for december.

rackforce are cheap, and do several unlimited packages that could suit you.

Think transfer security is a problem ... there's a security problem far worse:

(a post of mine reposted from ICANNWatch http://www.icannwatch.org/ - slashdot.org rejected it, but I'm used to that LOL!)

-----

Bogus "Whois Problem Reports" are increasingly going from being an annoyance to being a real security risk. Some recent incidents I've experienced due to Whois Problem Reports *merely* being filed:

* Dotster, about two weeks ago, threatened to delete a domain if I didn't respond.

* BulkRegister, just yesterday, threatened to suspend a domain if I didn't respond within 5 calendar days.

What good are Whois Problem Reports when anyone can file one and there is virtually no screening performed to ensure such reports have any validitity to them; reports filed on some of my domains claimed everything was wrong, including the expiration date - what!? Talk about pure nonsense!

As of now, if one wants to cause a registrant problems, all they need to do is file bogus reports at the Internic link below (it's so easy, it's frightening!) - heck, if someone really wanted to be deviant, they could spread a virus that sends bogus Whois Problem Reports from hijacked computers...

http://wdprs.internic.net/

In addition, some registrars, such as GoDaddy, charge a fee to the registrant for *merely* reviewing a Whois Problem Report for a particular domain, regardless of whether the report is valid - see links below for more details:

http://www.dnforum.com/showthread.php?t=67862

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&th readid=328696&perpage=15&pagenumber=1

There is much talk about the transfer policy changes and security, yet bogus Whois Problem Reports is a security risk many times worse.

Some ICANN policy changes are needed pronto regarding Whois Problem Reports...

1. Requiring more than just a name and email for people making complaints - they should have to provide a postal address that's verifyable and/or some other information.

2. Screening of such reports - permit registrars, if they're not already, to toss out Whois Problem Reports that they feel are invalid without involving the registrant; stop wasting their time over this nonsense.

3. A standard on how registrars handle Whois Problem Reports

* including a reasonable time for the registrant to respond, such as 30 calendar days, before any action is taken ... as of now, some registrars do little while others suspend domains within only a few days - so if one goes away on holiday, they could very likely come back and find their domains suspended/deleted.

Something needs to be done before bogus Whois Problem Reports get any further out of hand ...

Ron Bennett

Network Solutions has a very bad reputation. 1997 is a long time ago but actually I remember having a very suspicious experience with a domain checking site (can't remember which) around 1996.

Here's a link to a discussion:
webhostingtalk.com

Apparently NetSol/Verisign is the same as SnapNames.

A quote: "Another good thing of late is they done a deal with NameZero and what NameZero are in the middle of doing is handing over the names to SnapNames customers (for a small fee) for any names that customers of there's have asked for but not yet paid for.. so that's some 1.2 million names as I understand it."

The fourth vulnerability (createPopup) has already been exploited in phishing scams for some time now. Initial reports of the exploit only started coming in a couple months ago, even the vulnerability has existed since IE 5.5.

Scammers use it to mask the address bar and/or other browser widgets (such as the secure icon). This exploit is particularly dangerous because it can be used to mask/disguise any part of the user's screen, including other windows or even the start menu.

I submitted it to slashdot over a month ago, but it was never greenlighted. I guess these IE vulnerabilities are so commonplace it takes several at once to make the main page...

> Where does one go to look for people to collaborate with technical (hosting, DB management), artistic, and web design help?

There are tons of good resources for technical talk. A good start can be found at web hosting talk or SitePoint

> What have your web site startups been like, have you any advice to offer?

To choose the software to power your community, check out successful ones at http://www.big-boards.com/ . When looking at the statistics, it seems the php-powered vbulletin is the most popular amongst large communities.

This site also has a couple of interesting interviews with admins sharing their thoughts on what made their community successful, how did it start-up, are they making money etc.
Gaia Online interview
Neowin interview
NASIOC interview

I recently moved from ServerMatrix's parent company, The Planet, because of their poor customer service and new billing software, which refused to take my credit card. Interland didn't have a problem with my card, and customer service has been great so far. They have "self-managed" servers for $69/mo, with 500 GB of transfer, running RH9. Cologuys was mentioned in a previous post for a colo solution, and I used to work for another company that had a cage in the same datacenter, Colo4Dallas, which isn't a bad site, but one of the main bandwidth providers for Colo4 is Cogent, which has had many complaints about the network reliability. Besides, if you're coloing a large number of machines, you'd probably be better off going straight to Colo4. Both The Planet and Colo4 are right off Stemmons Freeway (I-35) in Dallas, TX, as is the Infomart (warning, flash heavy site!), where The Planet started before they bought the old Inflow datacenter. They helpfully provide a listing of thier tenants, so you can possibly find a good deal going through the list.

I would strongly recommend against any of the DTI owned companies (affordablecolo.com, affordabledomain.net, affordableservers.net, or dtihosting.com), as I have worked with them in the past and witnessed the unplugging of live servers from power strips so they could be rearranged in a rack for the amusement of the one senior technician they had - the 21 year old owner. Webhostingtalk.com has many, many, stories from former customers of DTI - search for cbaker17, the owner's handle, to find them quickly. For that matter, I'd recommend researching any company you're looking into on WHT.

I've heard good things about servermatrix from a lot of ex-rackshack users. YMMV, of course. Read the webhostingtalk forums.

From this tread:
"Posted by thedavid"

Here's the relevent section that ev1 agreed to:

"TERM AND TERMINATION

This license shall remain in effect until terminated as set forth herein. You may terminate this Agreement, without right to refund, by notifying SCO of such termination. SCO may terminate this Agreement, upon reasonable notice and without judicial or administrative resolution, if You or any of Your employees or consultants breach any term or condition hereof."

Thats not the full agrement, but at least som of it.

foonet thread on WHT

As an aside, most forums have a search, and it doesn't take but three seconds to type "foonet" and look at the results.

But if you skip a few pages on you see some intersting stuff a few days later: like this

We were in contact with Agent White earlier today. They did confirm that they had all of the hardware. They are apparently working 24/7 to mirror all the hard drives.

In our case, we are the owners of the hardware and it is necessary for us to have the computers to continue operate as a business. Apparently, we will be receiving our hardware within a week of signing the waiver. The hardware will be shipped directly to us.

Before the hardware is released, we are required to fill a waiver. Basically it says that we "waive the provisions of Rule 1002 of the Federal Rules of Evidence as it applies to the aforementioned computers which were seized by the FBI on February 14, 2004"

The waiver also states that you "agree that the duplicate images of the hard disk drives of said computers created by the FBI on February 15, 2004 or later will be admissible as original evidence of the contents of said hard disk drives at any court proceeding relating to this investigation and further agree not to contest the admissibility of the contents of said duplicate images in any court proceedings which may result from this investigation"

Apparently the basement was specifically built for the purpose of hosting servers. Everything was in racks.

Rumors have ben flying for quite awhile that Paul (the owner) was either involved or turned a blind eye to DDoS drones on his network. Some rumors stated that he's DDoS competitors to prove the superiority of CITHosting's DDoS hardened servers.

Seeing as this "data center" seems to have been his basement, I'd bet his (lack of) logs, records, and monitoring left the FBI little choice but to seize the whole thing. And, we can assume he was uncooperative as he may have been involved or at least knoweledgeable.

The general reputation of Foonet also seemed to be a bit on the black hat side. No doubt there may have been some legitimate customers as well, but they seem to be known more for their spammers and script kiddies (and cheap shell accounts) than for their legitimate webhosting.

All in all, it looks to me like the FBI did what it had to do to effectively process the warrant. They were evidently going after a network, not a specific machine. Unfortunately, some legitimate customers got caught up in it.

It looks like CTIHosting was recently sold, and is being moved to a new data center in Chicago. Let's hope that it comes back as a legitimate business this time. They've already stated that IRC will be down indefinitely, so that's a good sign.

It's not like I agree with this, if indeed things happened as the article state... but a quick google on FooNet (AKA / DBA CIT ) turns up some VERY interesting results.

I google'd quickly on a hunch, and sure enough I got some rather interesting hits.

I claim to know nothing about SPEWS and how they go about adding to the blacklists, but they apparently are no stranger to it.

Furthermore, it seems that this IS NOT the first run-in with the FBI that FooNet/CIT has had: from here, if you scroll down a bit, you'll see the following text: The FBI executed a search warrant issued by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio regarding the IRC network that we host # We regret to inform you that on Saturday February 14, 2004 at approximately 8:35 am EST, FOONET/CIT's data center in Columbus, Ohio temporarily ceased operations. And this was from Feb. 14 ...

Another incident was reported out here on 07/12/03 (search the page for "foonet") ... seems that 84898 spams swamped a box, and follow-up by FooNet sucked - e.g. they turned a blind eye.

There are far too many hits to return ... if you're interested in more, you can always head here. For now, I'll close with this: I do not agree with the methods used, if they were as described ... however, FooNet/CIT is no stranger to the FBI, and perhaps this is all rolled in to the Feb. 14th notice ... maybe the FBI actually gave them 10 days to comply... I'd really like to see how this ends.

Its worth reading this thread
Rus

I'm using JVDS right now and am reasonably pleased. Occasional unexplained reboots (also explained security reboots) aside, their speeds and prices are good.

You should definitely take a look at webhostingtalk.com and read what others are saying about various VPSes. It's how I found JVDS, and a lot of newer (read: potentially flakier) startups offer incredible early-signup bonuses to forum members.

From the article: Another challenge: Most people can't identify a counterfeit bill. Sang says federal officials showed him one-sided bills and even black and white bills that had been passed.

Do you really think the 16 year old cashier at Wal-Mart or the local grocery store can tell the difference between a real and fake bill- or cares? My guess is that more counterfied currency gets passed than people realized. Heck, there was a story a while ago about someone successfully using a fake TWO HUNDRED DOLLAR BILL.

The fact is that I doubt it cost HP too much money, or they wouldn't have bothered - and it sounded like a lot of the efforts were more advice to the government on how to design the current crop of new peach $20's to not copy on their printers than modifications on their printer to not copy them.

no setup fee
50 cents per gig of storage per month flat fee
no transfer fees

I found about it at webhostingtalk's forums

Tranxactglobal have a pretty good name in the server business.

As someone else mentioned, get your own domain and host the site somewhere. You can domains as low as $5 a year and host it anywhere from $10/yr (for a cheapo company that won't be around in a year) to $10/mo and up.. If you just want email, dont pay any more than $10/mo, if not less.

Then you can set the email addresses yourself from a simple web interface and if the host has a good spam system in place, you wont have to deal with that either.

Also, ask people you know for suggestions.. Don't go to those "10 best hosting companies!" as they're pretty much all paid placement. If you really care where you're going, browse Webhostingtalk and look for people that post often and are helpful. I figure if they're willing to help others on their own time, they'll help you out when you're a paying customer..

I run a Linux Virtual Private Server Hosting company.

I've been considering providing a domain name service. But I think its in people best interests to decouple their domain name from their hosting provider. Why?

You can probably get the domain cheaper from a domain name specialist. GoDaddy and the like.

Places like ZoneEdit offer an unbeatable, easy to use, reliable and free DNS service. Or you can just to it yourself on your VPS. You have root right?

If you need to move hosts then there is no third party (ex host) to get in the way. Even if they are a fair host, you still have issues over controlling the timing of any changes. With your own domain/DNS, you can time your switchover to the within a few minutes.

Finally, if you didn't get the domain name yourself to begin with, and if you are relying on your old webhost for the transfer, then just be persistent with them. If they treat you unfairly, tell the world or find if they are listed on a review site and provide (an accurate and fair, of course) review of what they did.

I run a Virtual Private Server hosting company. I'd say my most of my time was spent dealing with people.

That includes answering simple questions for potential customers. And every now and then answering 'hard' support questions which might have me googling around trying to find answers.

I spend a bit of time setting up new servers. That used to take hours per server. Now I've got a personal best of 30 minutes (and that included a fully featured kernel recompile).

Since my server setups are pretty standard and the management of them is pretty much scripted, the day to day management of a lot of servers isn't that much of a handful.

Other than the support and hardware side of things, its a bit of everything: Billing; updating the default software installs; working on the website; adding HOWTOs; finding cheaper/faster/better host servers and network connections; reading the wht forums; new customer setups; answering 4AM in the morning pages; ...

I understand how unpleasant this is for you, but I also understand the ISP's viewpoint. Mail from a cable modem address is very likely to be spam. As someone operating a legitimate server on a residential address, you're too tiny a minority for these giants to notice.

Your colo price is way too high. You can get a dedicated server for $100/month at Rackshack and many companies on webhostingtalk. Or, if you rebuild your server into a 1ru case, you can colo it for $40-$50 / month. But if you know someone who rents a full rack at a colo, they might accept your box for $20 or $30. Ask on the isp-colo list.

If you know a small business owner with DSL, you might arrange the same deal. They usually get 5 IP addresses and only use 1. Also try small local ISPs. They may already have "obsolete" boxes in their racks that they'd like to rent. Emphasize that you're a low-bandwidth, low maintenance customer.

The economy is down, and many folks overinvested in network infrastructure. It's a buyer's market.