One more bad Webhost!

First of all, a few words, so that I make sure that Google catches them well: zighost, also known as 1uhost, sucks! Avoid 1uhost at all costs! Stay away from 1uhost! Why? Just read the following…

My homepage was suddenly suspended last week, showing a dreadful 404 error message. Before that, the server was just down for all users, so I was just assuming that they were in the process of restoring data for my account, but after a couple of days, I finally asked my webhost (zighost – I am not putting a link on purpose in order not to make it go up in google’s ranking system) about it.

I was answered that I had some cgi scripts taking too much system resources. Or at least, this is what I could understand from the message, written in a such an approximate English, that it could have meant about anything.

Right. The only cgi script I have is blosxom, a simple perl script which browses text files in the UNIX file system, that I use for this weblog. Apart from that, I’m also using Gallery, a simple php gallery, widely used on the Internet. However, you won’t find any forum, any shopping cart, any chat system on this homepage: just the minimum one needs to make a homepage.

On top of that, access to my account was just not possible, neither by ssh nor through the cpanel. Kind of amusing, when I was nicely prompted to fix this issue. “You must fix this”, as they said. Well, I can’t really help if you don’t give me access to my account! I also requested more details about the actual culprit but didn’t get any answer for a while. After sending several messages to the Helpdesk Center, I finally obtained access to my account again, with another nice message “Your site unsespended.Please fix immediately”.

I took notice of the warning, but instead, the thing I immediately did was to download a full backup of my homepage, thinking that if my account was suspended again, at least, I’d have all files available to switch to another webhost. What happened next tells me that I showed wisdom in doing so. Anyway, I wanted to show good will, so I started checking what I could remove, so I:

• Disabled the slideshow feature of the gallery, which was said to be CPU potentially intensive
• Decreased the number of posts showed in the weblog to 5
• Reduced the frequency of the crontabs

In spite of those precautions, my account got suspended again 2 days after the changes, again with a very nice reply to my message to the support team:

Hi,

It has been necessary for us to suspend the account ‘shiromi’, monopolises and hard use system resources.
If you have a solution to this problem please do let me know reactivate the account, if not, I will remove the account totally at the end of the week without refund.

If you require any additional information or we can be of any further assistance please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind Regards,
1UHOST Abuse Team

At this point, I knew it was time to think about another provider. My choice went to Bluehost, a webhost which won the Best New Host Award in 2003, featuring everything that others provide, plus ssh access, 2Gb of disk space and 75Gb of bandwidth, everything for approximately the same price as competitors.

In the meantime, I requested more information to zighost/1uhost about the cause of the problem, knowing that I am likely not to get any constructive answer. They just disabled my account because they intended to do so andit seems there is nothing I can do about it, except warning people not to go for zighost or 1uhost (there may be other aliases, but those are the ones I know of). I should actually have suspected something when I noticed that all customers were hosted on the same physical machine, along with the website of the company… Afterwards, I also found some very bad criticisms on various forums about that webhost, among which, my favorite one is:

www.1UHOST.com

Actually, I’ll allow myself to make one attack on a host – this one. Easy to fall for, but if you do – simply forget about the service and money invested. If your site starts generating lots of traffic, the site will be suspended and good luck getting someone e-mailing you back. Based on my own investigation, the company is pure fraud, founded and operated by some kid in Turkey.

One-bad-spelling-and-grammar-sentence-replies is what you will get. Guaranteed.

And the reply from 1uhost:

You sad;

“Based on my own investigation, the company is pure fraud, founded and operated by some kid in Turkey.”

Our company is really company at hosting endustry.An TEKNOLINE INTERNET company.And we have valid tax office and number and we have registered company in Turkey.Our based office in Turkey and our company registered in Turkey.And, our datacenters are in USA.We have changed servers to excellent support and quality datacenter now.We datacenter name is NAC now.This datacenter is high quality and premium datacenter.

Your site suspended, becouse, you violated to our AUP.And, we give you all your money.

Have a nice day

No comments… Just stay away from 1uhost and any of their aliases! Resolve the IP address of the webhost, and if it matches 69.72.228.218 (their current IP address), add the webhost to your blacklist.