While talking with the technician I was informed that at 6 P.M. they were going to be releasing any pre-ordered iPhone 4 S’ that had not been picked up and that the line was starting by the door.  At this point it was only 5:15 PM so I walked to the outer door to find that I was only second in line.  I chatted with the person in front of me whom was a very nice woman and over the next 30 minutes the line behind me grew quite quickly up to about 45 individuals.

One of the Apple Store representatives came out and started at the beginning of the line asking us what flavor of the iPhone 4 S we wanted (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB), and I was disappointed to hear that I likely would not get my hands on a 64 GB Black AT&T iPhone 4 S.  My, now previous, 32 GB iPhone 4 was getting full with only around 1 GB of free space so I was looking forward to upgrading.

At around 6:30 PM the Apple store representatives actually started pulling us in one at a time to sell us our devices and to my surprise they had one 64 GB Black AT&T iPhone 4 S which I quickly snapped up.  Overall I will be honest that I did not expect much of an improved experience but overall so far I am absolutely loving Siri and the iPhone 4 S.  The phone itself feels a bit snappier, although the iPhone 4 itself was already quite fast but the selling point for me is Siri.

On my 45 minute drive home I found myself using Siri to communicate with friends via text without ever having to actually look at what they said or type a single letter myself.  I’ve also found it’s extremely accurate at understanding my voice and I’ve found myself using it to enter more and more data as I’ve been using the phone.  I have to say, Siri alone, is a valid reason to move from an iPhone 4 to an iPhone 4 S.

At the end of the day, I wish it was an iPhone 5 with a larger screen as well as a laundry list of other upgrade and feature requests, but I can honestly say I am happy with my iPhone 4 S.

Now there are two feature requests, that I would really love to see integrated into iOS for iPhone/iPad:

1. The ability to have a custom tone for emails based upon email ID. (i.e. from=”thewife@comcast.net” sound=”something custom”).
2. The ability to set a custom tone or contact to over-ride silence.

Here is the ripped version of our site (that is not live, yet, as of this posting), side-by-side with their current site, and the MDDHosting Site.  Click on the links for full-size.

While I sincerely hope that this “provider” chooses not to use our design illegally, if they do – I will do my best to make sure any of their potential clients are aware of their illegal use of our copyrighted intellectual property.

Recently an individual associated with the domain “xthosts.com” decided to rip a copy of our design and make it available for public download.  While they haven’t realistically done anything that anybody with basic skills couldn’t do if they spent some time doing it, they did make our copyrighted intellectual property illegally available to others in a fashion which proliferates the illegal use of our design.

We knew it was only a matter of time before we would have to go on the offensive to protect our intellectual property, and that time has passed.  The “provider” going by the name “Coomme” is using an illegal copy of our design and, as such, is violating international copyright laws.  What scares me the most about this, isn’t the fact that they could damage our reputation and corporate image, but that if they couldn’t take the time to come up with their own design and they did such a horrible job of editing in their own logos, what kind of service can their “customers” expect?

I can only hope that anybody looking into potentially signing up with “Coomme Hosting” can come across this post and realize that the provider they were considering is knowingly using stolen property.

Here is a current view of MDDHosting.com and Coomee.com as of this writing.  Click on the images for full size.

If you look closely at the logo and the arrow that begins with “Secure & reliable hosting” you will see the obvious marks from the design being edited.  It sickens me to know that there are individuals who will steal so blatantly.

Update 08/11/2011 – 1:27 PM EDT

It seems that they think that simply changing some of the colors, but yet still stealing the design itself makes the site “legal”… Seriously… GET YOUR OWN DESIGN.

Update 08/11/2011 – 6:47 PM EDT

The logo has changed, although it’s still using our rounded parallelogram and dashed lines, they’ve also changed the background on the comparison boxes and the colors of the “Order Now” and “Learn More” buttons.  There is still a lot of our copyrighted material in use, but who knows, maybe by the time they’re done butchering this illegal copy of our intellectual property it won’t be recognizable?

Many think that selling hosting is as simple as taking the disk and transfer allocations, splitting them up into their individual plans, and then sitting back and waiting for the money to come rolling in.  This usually ends up in the person who tried to start said company realizing, after a few months, that they aren’t going to get rich quick like they expected and that hosting really is a lot of work.  What happens to somebody who starts a business to get rich instead of because it’s what they are passionate about do you ask?  The answer is simple: the business folds.

Most new hosting companies are operated by individuals who have little to no business sense or experience and many times they fail to plan or to even see the big picture.  These individuals purchase a $5 to $15 per month plan and then expect to compete with the larger providers purely by cost but they fail to realize that in this industry that the less somebody pays, the more they expect from you and your service.  The individual who jumps from provider to provider looking for the best possible price tends to be the person who causes the most trouble and due to the naivety of these new hosting companies they become overwhelmed by cheap customers.

New hosting companies that manage to stick it out more than a year or two have a small chance of actually becoming profitable if they plan accordingly and make all of the right decisions.  Too many times have I seen a provider that appeared to know what they were doing but in reality they had no technical know-how and relied heavily upon friends and others in the industry to essentially run their business for them.  These hosting companies often will go from design to design mimicking as closely as possible, without directly copying, the providers that they themselves see as successful.  What these hosting companies don’t realize is that it’s not just the site design that makes the provider successful but the whole package.

I’ve said numerous times in the past that any company can try to copy what we do but more often than not they will fail to see the big picture and simply copying one aspect of how we operate our business will not give them the reputation and growth that we’ve worked hard to obtain over the years.  You can copy a design, you can copy an advertisement, you can post in the same forums, but none of this in and of itself will lead to success.

At the end of the day if you have a solid business plan, the time, the money, the desire, and the passion for running your own hosting company then you very well may succeed.  If you’re simply starting a provider in an attempt to make some quick and easy money, I suggest you stop now before you damage our industry any more than it already has been by the countless before you.

My experiences with R1Soft formally began on March 12th, 2009 when we first obtained our trial R1Soft license.  I was in contact with David Wells from R1Soft after having faced an issue with some lost MySQL databases due to a mistake made by a technician when performing some maintenance on a server.  When discussing the issue with David he made it clear that with R1Soft backing up the server not only could we have restored those destroyed databases but we would also be protected against total data loss such as a catastrophic server failure.

We used the original trial license until March 30th, 2009 when we purchased the R1Soft Linux CDP starter pack for $500 including 5 Linux CDP agents, 1 MySQL addon, and 1 Archiving addon.  This was an excellent deal and up until this point R1Soft had lived up to every promise and we were very happy with the software.

David at R1Soft mentioned CDP 3.0 was coming out soon and mentioned, if memory serves, within the next quarter.  Promises were made such as faster backups, faster restorations, more reliable operation, cPanel integration, a more streamlined interface, and a lot of other features that surely anybody else running R1Soft 2.0 would love to see.  I’ll cut straight to the point – it was nearly 2 years before the 3.0 version of the R1Soft CDP was released in beta and even then it didn’t include all of the features that were promised and was even missing many of the key features of 2.0.

R1Soft 3.0 beta was released as a “standard edition” which only allowed backing up to the same server on either a secondary disk or network mounted storage.  There was no centralized backup server and when I looked into it no bare metal restoration – both features that had been available in 2.0 for over 2 years.  When the “enterprise edition” was finally released in beta, years after it was promised, it did not include bare metal restore or cPanel integration.  You are reading this correct – basic 2.0 features were totally absent from the 3.0 version of the R1Soft CDP even with it having been released nearly 2 years after it was originally promised.

With version 2.0 over the years and 3.0 the short period that we’ve been using it – we’ve always had strange issues that we’ve reported that have been entirely ignored.  We’ve had issues where 2.0 would cause kernel panics, would simply fail to back up, or would fail to restore that support either stated they could not replicate, that they claim don’t exist, or that they claim will be fixed in “the next release” or “sometime soon” that still happen.  We’ve had tickets where we gave them full and complete access to a server to diagnose and reproduce the issue, view and download logs, or anything else they needed to do and gotten back canned responses telling us how to do things on WINDOWS R1Soft backup servers or agents when we run exclusively Linux and made it clear in the ticket.

One issue that we, as well as several providers I network with, have faced with CDP 2.0 is when an end user starts a restoration and does not select the “overwrite files” option and “overwrite failed” errors cause the agent to fail on the restoration.  Now it wouldn’t be quite as bad if the agent just failed out and quit – but it actually fails “on” and consumes a full CPU core indefinitely until an administrator manually kills the restoration process.  There are several valid reasons to do a restoration without overwriting such as if you wish to replace any deleted files inside of a directory tree from a backup without overwriting any files not deleted – this error makes this impossible.  One provider I speak with opened a ticket about this on or around April 9th, 2009 and this issue has yet to be resolved.

Right now R1Soft 3.0 is extremely unstable on OpenVZ kernels, and has been since it has been released.  I know of approximately 5 kernel issues that R1Soft 3.0 has on various CentOS, CloudLinux, and OpenVZ kernels that cause the backups to either simply fail, or worse, for the entire server to hang or lock up.  Not only are R1Soft agent licensed extremely expensive, but they will take your production servers OFFLINE which is unacceptable.  I’ve gotten word that these issues have been resolved and will need to go through 10 business days of QA testing meaning, at minimum, 2 weeks before these serious kernel incompatibilities are resolved assuming all of their testing goes well.

With what R1Soft charges for new licenses, charges for maintenance, and the number of licenses they’ve sold, I simply do not understand how they cannot have a solid development team that can resolve issues in a timely fashion as well as building the new revisions of the software that have been promised.  Why does it take R1Soft 2 years to go from 2.0 to 3.0 when it was promised and why is the software so ridiculously unreliable, buggy, and incomplete when it finally makes it to the market?

Update 02/17/2011

R1Soft 3.0 has some “kernel” issues that occasionally causes a server under specific circumstances to lock up entirely forcing a reboot.  Their development team apparently has recently just finished finding and fixing all of these issues however the next step is to push those updates through “Quality Assurance” and then they’ll be available to those using the software.  While I am all for “QA”, I’m more for us not having to reboot servers twice a week due to the backup process causing the server to hang.

Last night the R1Soft process killed one of our servers at around 5 AM EST and unfortunately it occurred during a period of time that did not have staff coverage. The staff member who was supposed to be watching the process that decided to go awol which meant that bringing the server back online quickly fell onto my shoulders.  Coincidentally, knowing that we had staff coverage, I set my phone on silent for the first time in over two years and it just so happens that this is the night that R1Soft causes the server to hang up, while a staff member is not working like they should, and my phone is on silent.  I’m not trying to make excuses as the staff member should have been doing their job and that is definitely a failure on our part.

It is however a bad situation that should never have happened – if the R1Soft CDP Agent and Kernel Module would work like they’re supposed to the server never would have crashed and been offline.  While yes, the staff member certainly should have been doing their job which would have involved rebooting the server within minutes and avoiding extended downtime, ultimately the failure is due to the R1Soft Software.  I hope for R1Soft’s sake that no competitor brings a quality product to market although I dream about it every night.

It’s bad that a backup system that we rely on to protect our customers’ data also causes us to have to make sure we have somebody awake and watching in case the backup system takes one of our servers offline.  Hopefully R1Soft will have the fixes for these issues pushed out within the next two weeks although I won’t be holding my breath.

Comcast Bill showing $50 "Unbilled Activity"

Let me first begin by saying that I’ve had Comcast Internet and Television service for well over 4 years and for the most part I’ve been satisfied with the service itself.  I’ve rarely had to use customer service as generally I’ve not had issues with any of my services and when I did for the most part Comcast fixed those issues in a timely fashion.  I’m not entirely sure what has changed over the last year or so, but things have gone seriously down hill when it comes to customer service.  I’m going to do my absolute best to detail exactly what happened, how it happened, and why it happened so that you can hopefully make an informed decision as to whether you wish to go with Comcast, to continue your existing Comcast service, or to shift to/choose another provider.

On September 27th, 2010 my wife and I moved in to our new apartment a couple of minutes away from our old apartment and we had previously called to schedule Comcast to come out and perform a transfer of service to get our DVR Box and our Cable box online in our new apartment.  Comcast came out and performed the transfer of service free of charge and since we were moving into a larger apartment we opted to go ahead and get another digital box for one of our bedrooms while we were at it.  The technician that came out explained to me that this was his first installation where he was on his own and apologized ahead of time if it took longer than we expected.  I told the technician that I understood and that it wasn’t an issue.

The technician did what he needed to do including making the connection in the junction box at the back of the apartment building, cutting and putting ends on coaxial cables for our DVR, Cable Modem, and Digital Box, and installing a splitter for the DVR and Cable box.  The technician tested the line for the DVR and the cable modem and everything seemed to be working well so he went into the bedroom for the new digital box.  The digital box was having some issues and displaying an error code so he powered the box off and back on and it appeared to work fine so he finished up his paperwork and left.

About a week went by before we had a chance to use the cable box in the bedroom and when we turned on the TV it was giving the same error code it did at the original installation prompting me to call Comcast and have them come out to take a look at the box.  A technician came out the next week and at first glance he said that the cable box was dead and went ahead and swapped it out for a brand new box and told me that the issue would be resolved.  I tested the box myself and was pleased to see that the box was indeed working as it should.  The technician finished his paperwork and left and everything was fine for about a week.

The next week I began seeing 20% to 30% packet loss on my internet connection and I ran numerous tests to Google.com as well as several other sites and servers around the United States and abroad to ensure that it wasn’t something specific to a particular site, switch, router, or network outside of Comcast’s control.  I directly connected the modem to the computer and tested to ensure that it wasn’t the router and I switched out ethernet cables as well to ensure it wasn’t a bad cable however the issue continued.  At this point I determined that something was wrong and it wasn’t my equipment so I called and scheduled for a technician to come out and look into the issue.

The earliest the technician could come out was around four days later which was less than satisfactory as my livelihood requires an internet connection and I had to resort to a cellular 3G connection in the meantime.  Finally once the technician came out he hooked up his tester and made sure that our cables and ends in the wall were in good shape and he informed me that they were and that there didn’t appear to be any issues between the junction box and the wall plate in the wall.  He then proceeded to look over the coaxial cables that the original installer put in place and found that the original installer had failed to properly put the ends on the coaxial cables.  He was rather shocked to see this issue as he said it was a very simple thing to fix and very odd for it to be overlooked when putting ends onto a coaxial cable.  If my memory serves me correctly he said that the original installer neglected to put a seal on the connector, or something similar.

The technician fixed the cable, the one that the original installer brought and installed, and I ran my tests and the packet loss was gone and the signal to the modem was once again excellent.  Everything has been absolutely wonderful from that point until today, when I went to pay my Comcast bill.  I saw that my Comcast bill had $50 in “Unbilled Activity” which you can see by clicking on the thumbnail of the bill at the top of this post.  I had no idea what these charges were for so I called Comcast’s customer service to discuss the charges.

I was connected with a customer service representative who explained that the $50 charge was for the technician to come out to repair the service, and that the issue was with our equipment and not theirs.  The representative even went so far as to say that the installer had replaced a “line drop connector” however when I asked her what a “line drop connector” was she said that she didn’t know and that I would have to get in contact with a technician.  I told the representative that this was unacceptable and that there was no way that I am going to pay a charge for something if they can’t even tell me what the charge was.  I had the call escalated to a supervisor as the customer support representative couldn’t adequately explain the charge.

I was connected with a supervisor and she explained to me that it was to replace a connector in the face plate on the wall which didn’t happen and yes, they’re charging me $50 for a $0.50 connector.  I told the supervisor what the technician did when he came out, that he said it was indeed an installation error, and that it was a simple fix and that the technician told me that I would not be charged for the visit.  The supervisor said that it was a legitimate charge and that there was nothing that she could do about it.  At this point I was becoming extremely frustrated and I asked to be escalated to the next level supervisor at which point the individual told me that management did not take phone calls and that there was essentially nothing more that I could do.

I asked the supervisor to transfer me to another supervisor hoping that I would get a hold of somebody with a real sense of customer service and would at the very least get me to somebody who could resolve the issue, or advise me on how to further pursue the issue to get it resolved in a timely fashion.  The next supervisor that I spoke with on the phone simply told me that it was against company policy to escalate a phone call any further and that all they could do was escalate it on their end, but didn’t explain to me what that entailed or what to expect.  The supervisor even went so far as to actually say that he agreed with me that in this particular case this was an extreme lack of quality customer service but he told me that there was literally nothing more that he could do to help me.

Essentially it comes down to the fact that the original installer that was contracted by Comcast to install my service in the new apartment failed to do so correctly and I’m now being billed for the incompetence of the original installer.  When contacting Comcast customer service I’m being told that the technician that fixed the issue put a code down that caused me to be billed and since it was a legitimate code that there is nothing that they can do to waive the charge.  If Comcast doesn’t in some way, shape, or form let me know that they really do appreciate me as a customer and tell me that they are going to make this situation right, at the least, I’m going to look into alternate providers for my services.

My business is growing at a decent pace and I’m looking at opening a physical office location for my employees to work out of which would have been a Comcast Business connection in addition to the data and TV connections that I currently have in my apartment but at this point it looks as though Comcast is going to be potentially losing out on my future business as well as my current business.  I sincerely hope that Comcast hasn’t grown so large that they don’t care about their individual customers and don’t care if they’re unhappy, receive poor customer service, or simply choose to no longer do business with Comcast due to these reasons.

Comcast: make this right, or I’m going to do my absolute best in every way, shape, and form to make sure that anybody I ever have any interactions with be it business, personal, or otherwise knows exactly about your services, the lack of customer service, and everything that these issues entail.  The ball is in your court, I hope you make the right decision.

Not too long ago we decided to re-evaluate our decision to lease our hardware and ultimately decided to obtain our own fully owned hardware and to colocate that hardware in a data center facility.  The initial cost is one of the largest barriers to get over when going from leased to owned and as an example we’ve spent nearly $25,000 in new equipment alone.  We’ve bought server chassis, processors, motherboards, RAM, raid controllers, hard disks, power distribution units, and switches in order to bring our systems online at a new facility.

There is a lot that goes into deciding which facility you’re going to go with and it requires a lot more research and time than choosing a leased provider.  When you’re leasing you can simply order new servers somewhere else, cancel the old servers at the old provider, and shift your data over.  When you colocate your own hardware it’s not so easy to make a change like this.  You either have to double your hardware to do live transfers or you have to take the sites and services offline to physically transport the hardware from one facility to another.  All of this makes it very important for you to make sure that you’ve chosen a facility you can trust and one that you plan on doing business with for a very long time.

We researched facilities for several months and looked at the pricing, power, cooling, transit providers, locations, redundancy, and remote hands and ultimately settled upon HandyNetworks LLC based out of Denver, Colorado.  This is going to be a learning experience for myself as well as those who work for me so I’m going to do my best to post my experiences, expectations, and any surprises we face along the way.  The hardware will be online on or around November 15th, 2010 and we’ll begin transitioning customers over to the new facility starting on November 18th.

If there is anything particular you’d like to know about the process of choosing the facility, the transfer process, or anything else having to do with obtaining hardware and colocating – feel free to comment this post or any future posts on the subject and I’ll do my best to address your questions.

# Query_time: 9 Lock_time: 0 Rows_sent: 0 Rows_examined: 4281017

Now if you’re not a webmaster, server administrator, or developer the above line may not mean too much to you.  I understand that many people who install WordPress and dozens or more plugins really have no idea what it takes for that to all “work”.  In this particular case the above line is one single query made by the “Yet Another Related Post Plugin” on a WordPress database.  The query took 9 seconds and examined over 4.2 MILLION rows of data – and this was done on a shared web hosting server.

Generally a table with several thousand rows is considered to be fairly large and more often than not those identified as abusing the MySQL server are doing queries in the 100,000 to 250,000 row range.  When investigating slower than normal query performance and higher than normal CPU consumption from the MySQL server I came across several copies of this query for one database, on one blog, by one customer.

In a shared environment where you’re sharing everything with others on the server including, but not limited to, the MySQL server this is simply not something that is going to be acceptable.  Any provider that wishes to provide a quality performance platform to their clients will pick up on this sort of usage and will advise the client to either drop the plugin or to upgrade to another level of service where the extreme over-usage of MySQL is less likely to cause issues to others such as on a VPS platform or where it’s guaranteed not to cause issues to others such as a dedicated server.

At the end of the day, there are ultimately going to be limits as to what you can or cannot do in a shared environment no matter how amazing the provider is.  My advice is to avoid the “YARPP” plugin, at least in a standard shared environment.  I didn’t look to see what version of the plugin is being used so it’s possible there’s a newer version available that has a less dramatic impact on MySQL performance.

We ended up buying a used washer and dryer that turned out to be a not-so-great purchase.  The set appeared to work fine however once we got them home and tried using them we quickly found out that the washer didn’t pump any cold water even on the “cold” setting but instead only used hot water.  The dryer also did a good job of drying but it sounded almost as if the drum was hitting the side of the dryer as it was running… Needless to say that I decided that buying a used washer and dryer wasn’t a good idea so I went to my local HHGregg store to look at a new set.

It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at major home appliances, at least several years, and I expected them to be around $1,000 or more per unit and was surprised to find this unit MSRP’d at $799 listed at $649 each at HHGregg!  I negotiated the price down with the salesman to $580 per unit and I feel I got a pretty good deal on the set.  I had to drive to the north side of Indianapolis, which is around a 45 minute drive from our apartment, to pick up the set.  I could have waited for the local store to get the units in stock however we had laundry that needed done and I really just wanted to bring them home that day.

I have to say that Samsung packed the appliances quite well!  The washer’s drum was supported from below on molded Styrofoam and the drum was held in place by four shipping bolts and spacers.  After getting the set fully unpacked and installed I ran them through an empty cycle to make sure that they were working as they should and then I got to washing laundry!

The washer uses an extremely low amount of water, so little that I was almost worried it wouldn’t get anything cleaned.  I quickly ran a full load through the washer and was amazed as it spun the drum up to 1,300 RPM during the spin cycle in perfect balanced harmony due to the Vibration Reduction Technology.  The washer is nearly completely silent as it does it’s job and the dryer is similar in that it’s extremely quiet.

At the end of the day – if you’re looking for a new washer and drier I can highly recommend Samsung appliances.  The estimated yearly operating cost of the washer is $14 if you’re using an electric water heater and $8 if using a gas powered heater.

The client was warned via private message and their warn level on the forum was increased and then they decided to make another reply yet again re-iterating their original post and going far enough to make a public threat against us on our forums.  We at this point disabled the client’s forum account and opened an abuse support ticket with them which you will find below.  The client’s identifying information has been removed as our privacy policy protects the client’s identity and personal information but the contents of the ticket itself is not personal.

MDDHosting – Abuse on Forums

Ticket ID: [Redacted]
Department: Abuse
Creation Date: 09/26/2010 20:28
Last Reply: 09/26/2010 22:47
Status: Closed
Priority: Medium

First and foremost I would like to say that I am very disappointed in your lack of self control in our community forums. We generally do our best to avoid having to moderate any posts as we like to keep things open and honest however we will not allow you to be intentionally derogatory towards us, our clients, or our services without just cause.

One thing you should keep in mind is that your account and services are on the ***Echo*** server and as such are not affected whatsoever by the issues we’re facing with the Fresco server. We’ve disabled your posting abilities on the forums for 30 days and your posts are set for moderator preview for 60 days. Please use your short vacation from the forums to think about how you have conducted yourself, and how you should have conducted yourself.

Thank you,

Michael Denney
MDDHosting – Professional Hosting
http://www.mddhosting.com/
Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/MDDHosting

I will be expecting a full apology and complete reversal of these actions
and then I might not switch to another host.

[Redacted Client Name]

I’ll be more than happy to apply a credit of $26.50 to your account however I will not apologize for reprimanding you on your conduct in our forums. If you wish to shift hosting providers, by all means do so.

Thank you,

Michael Denney
MDDHosting – Professional Hosting
http://www.mddhosting.com/
Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/MDDHosting

Thank you,

Michael Denney
MDDHosting – Professional Hosting
http://www.mddhosting.com/
Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/MDDHosting

Thank you,

Michael Denney
MDDHosting – Professional Hosting
http://www.mddhosting.com/
Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/MDDHosting

I understand you are displeased with our service this month. I also understand that you have been a client for 17 months without issues.

Ultimately, it comes down to an old saying: “When it rains, it pours.” Both the zero-day exploit on echo and the DDoS attack on fresco are situations that are out of our control. We do our best to remedy them as fast as possible while protecting your sites, customers and data.

Our TOS entitles you to a one month credit on your account for time lost due to the echo problem. This credit has already been added to your account and will be applied to future invoices.

As for the fresco DDoS attack, we have already made changes to mitigate the attack, and at this moment, the server is responding normally. We do not anticipate any downtime because of this attack. In fact, other than a few users in europe reporting slower than normal FTP connections, nobody reported any downtime or issues.

Regarding the forums: we hate to have to moderate our forums. It’s our policy to keep things 100% open and honest wherever possible, but we do need everyone to remain professional when replying to announcement threads. Clients, such as yourself, go there for important announcements about the status of their service. Off topic and unrelated conversation makes it difficult to effectively communicate what is happening. If you ever have an issue with a moderator decision, please open a support ticket and we will discuss it with you.

As I said earlier: when it rain’s, it pours. If you feel that a zero-day exploit, plus less than an hour of slightly slower than normal FTP connections truly negates 17 months of exceptional service and support, then we wish you good luck with your next provider.

If you understand that some things are out of our control, and that we do our best to mitigate them, protect you and your clients, and maintain great uptime whenever possible, then you are welcome to stick around and take advantage of the credit on your account. The choice is yours.

Thank you,

Scott S.
MDDHosting – Professional Hosting
http://www.mddhosting.com/
Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/MDDHosting

I wouldn’t exactly say I have not had any issues either. I did have to
contact your company support desk several times where sites just disappeared
which turned out to be a problem with the Lightning server not displaying
pages due to a permission error. Which was never explained as to why the
failure happened since permissions were never changed. Again I am a patient
man and I was able to research the problem and fix it and provide your
company with the details for future clients that had similar experiences.

Having server issues from time to time can be overlooked, but failure to
respect customers can’t.

[Redacted Client Name]

> Then someone made the mistake of treating me as if you were my customer and
> trying to tell me how I need to behave.
It’s our forums, not yours, and as such we will enforce the rules and guidelines on those forums as we see fit. If you disagree with the way that we choose to run our forums, you’re welcome to abstain from using them. Nobody is forcing you to post on the forums.

> I really could care less about a DDoS attack I knew that it would be handled
> easily I have done seen people douse those in the past.
This particular attack, yes – but not all attacks are equal. We always do our best to keep things online because to be honest that’s the business that we’re in. We’re not in the business of having sites offline.

> What does however create a problem is when I have someone that I am paying
> $503 a year treating me as if I am some kid
> and trying to admonish me over the slightest comment they choose to take
> offense.
We simply warned you that you needed to watch your attitude on the forums, if you took offense to that then there isn’t much that we can do about that. If you want to have a forum where you can make negative posts towards MDDHosting.com, by all means do start your own forum.

> I was nice enough to say I would settle for an apology and forget about it.
It’s like I said, we’re not going to apologize for reprimanding you on the forum. You can either move on with your life, or you can allow this to upset you when there is really no reason to be upset. I won’t go so far as to call you childish however I do personally feel it would be a tad childish to “throw a fit” over a forum reprimand.

> If he chooses to behave in this manner and be so thin skinned and childish I
> have no alternative but make sure I spend not another penny with your firm.
> There is a line a mile long these days of hosts that would love to have the
> $503 for the next however many years they can keep the doors open.
It’s not about the money – to be honest whether you paid us $1/year or $1,000/year the fact still stands that you would have been reprimanded on the forums and that I still would not apologize for doing so. You need to conduct yourself in a professional manner on our community forums. Using the forums is a privilege and *not* a right and as such we can suspend those privileges at any time. We’ve temporarily disabled your forum account for 30 days to give you some time to think about your actions on the forums.

> I wouldn’t exactly say I have not had any issues either. I did have to
> contact your company support desk several times where sites just disappeared
> which turned out to be a problem with the Lightning server not displaying
> pages due to a permission error. Which was never explained as to why the
> failure happened since permissions were never changed. Again I am a patient
> man and I was able to research the problem and fix it and provide your
> company with the details for future clients that had similar experiences.
I do believe the issue was explained however if you’d like to give me a ticket number I can look it over and tell you exactly why it happened.

> Having server issues from time to time can be overlooked, but failure to
> respect customers can’t.
In no way have we disrespected you – you were out of line on our forums and you were warned… You then took it a step further on the forum after having previously been warned and your forum account was disabled. Warning you on the forum and disabling your forum account is in no way disrespectful and is fully within our rights as the operators of the forums.

Thank you,

Michael Denney
MDDHosting – Professional Hosting
http://www.mddhosting.com/
Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/MDDHosting

I’m closing this ticket.

Thank you,

Michael Denney
MDDHosting – Professional Hosting
http://www.mddhosting.com/
Follow us on Twitter! http://twitter.com/MDDHosting