Who says they have to get people to actually pay? A couple hundred typical ad impressions could generate that kind of money easily. (Banner ads routinely sell, even today, for $15-50 per thousand impressions.)
Absolutely right, and something I wish one could make the average web hosting client understand. It's hard to talk about technical competence, good policy, and sane contingency planning, when all the customer sees is "Well, Joe Bob's web hosting will do it for $4.95 a month."
*sigh* You don't always get what you pay for, but *never* do you get more than you pay for.
It just amazes me that a provider as large as CIHost could let something like this happen. I run a web hosting operation nowhere near CIHost's size, but something like this just can't happen with proper planning. Besides the fact that DNS runs on a box with RAID, our zone files can be recreated from a twice-backed database in a matter of minutes. If we can do it, there's no reason an operation that size can't.
For those of you with CIHost, my condolences. I went through many, many providers before I finally got disgusted and decided to do it myself. There *are* decent web hosts; you just have to be careful. Too many will lie to you, and there's often no way to check their claims until it's too late. When you're shopping for a new host (as I hope a lot of you are) ask them *specific* questions about their backup methods and policies. Drill them to the smallest detail. (While CIHost may not have lost any user data, their backup policy for DNS was certainly VERY lacking.)
As mentioned in another comment, you *can* transfer your domains via FAX even if the administrative contact's e-mail isn't available - write me for help if you need it.
Good luck to all affected, and happy new year. (ha ha)
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The sad thing is they have two dual-proc servers with RAID arrays, on round-robin DNS, and it's still getting the living crap hammered out of it.
(I admin their servers...)
Who says they have to get people to actually pay? A couple hundred typical ad impressions could generate that kind of money easily. (Banner ads routinely sell, even today, for $15-50 per thousand impressions.)
--
Travis Burnside, QWK.Net, LLC
http://www.qwk.net
*sigh* You don't always get what you pay for, but *never* do you get more than you pay for.
It just amazes me that a provider as large as CIHost could let something like this happen. I run a web hosting operation nowhere near CIHost's size, but something like this just can't happen with proper planning. Besides the fact that DNS runs on a box with RAID, our zone files can be recreated from a twice-backed database in a matter of minutes. If we can do it, there's no reason an operation that size can't.
For those of you with CIHost, my condolences. I went through many, many providers before I finally got disgusted and decided to do it myself. There *are* decent web hosts; you just have to be careful. Too many will lie to you, and there's often no way to check their claims until it's too late. When you're shopping for a new host (as I hope a lot of you are) ask them *specific* questions about their backup methods and policies. Drill them to the smallest detail. (While CIHost may not have lost any user data, their backup policy for DNS was certainly VERY lacking.)
As mentioned in another comment, you *can* transfer your domains via FAX even if the administrative contact's e-mail isn't available - write me for help if you need it.
Good luck to all affected, and happy new year. (ha ha)