Well, this is really less of a question than a heads up and a way for me to vent after the 5th or 6th time I've had to tell these people how to do their job and spent hours getting my site back. But in case anyone else is considering using hostony.com for web hosting, don't. I know, for example, that Cd& had considered using them for ERT, and I gave the apparently crappy advice at the time that they were decent. Their deal seems really good and they do a great job of promoting themselves, and I basically deserve what I got for being such a cheapskate, but don't you be fooled also. This is only the last of a series of problems I've had over the last year, but now that it's fixed, I think it's actually somewhat amusing (especially that one of their techs ends every post with "good luck!").
My start page is my website, so I usually know immediately if there are any connection problems. Today it went down all of a sudden without any notice sent to me, and about 10 minutes later a page came up saying "This account has been suspended. Please contact support." What follows is one of the silliest encounters I think I have ever had, over the course of several hours. Unfortunately, their 24/7 live support was not available at all during this time
MeSupport ticket
Priority 1 - urgent
My site is down, and the homepage has a message saying the account has been suspended. This account is fully paid. I rely on the email addresses at this account and need them re-enabled immediately. Thank you
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Sergey Rusakov a couple hours later.....
Your site have beed suspended because through your fault, our server have been hacked. That's why you need update all scripts and delete all this files
victory.tgz
psy.tar.gz
root@server29 [/tmp]# locate psybnc
.....long output of files that do not belong to me, except for two in the tmp folder.......
Locking Password...Locking password for user nicholassolutions.
passwd: Success
Done
Suspending email account logins for nicholassolutions.com .... Done
Notifcation => administrator@hostony.com via EMAIL [level => 3]
Ftp Password Files synced
Vhost Passwords synced
nicholassolutions's account has been suspended
If you want using your site do it asap please, and inform us. After that we will unsuspend you site!
Good Luck!
Best regards,
Sergey Rusakov
---------------------------------------------
Me immediately after.....
First of all, I have done absolutely nothing wrong. I have no insecure scripts of any kind on my site, and my account was never compromised. The files listed do not belong to my account, and I never had write permission in any directory where they are stored. The files in the temp directory with my username could have been put there by anyone and chown'ed to my account (notice they are chmod 777). All the files in question are from [otherusername], NOT on my account.
In any case, how can I possibly delete anything after you have disabled my account? I cannot even log in. If you need files deleted, you have root access and can delete anything that needs to be removed.
Please enable my account immediately.
---------------------------------------------
[Sergey] about an hour later.....
I have unsuspend your account. And some files which you can see
root@server29 [/tmp]# locate psybnc
....more files that have nothing to do with me.....
is not from your account, these files from another account through our server have been hacked too.
Good Luck!
Best regards,
Sergey Rusakov
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Me immediately after
Thank you very much for unsuspending my account. However, my public_html folder is not accessible, because it is still owned by the root user:
~>ls -al | grep public_html
drwx--x--x 30 root root 4096 Oct 30 05:05 public_html
Could you please chown this folder to my user/group so I can edit my webpages? Once I have access, I will also make sure again that there are no scripts which could harm the server.
Thank you very much.
--------------------------------------------------------
Dima Skalenko about 20 min later.....
Dear customer,
the problem has been fixed.
Please let us know if you have any further problems.
Best regards,
Dima Skalenko,
Support team.
-------------------------------------------------------
Me right after....
Hello, thank you for fixing the owner on the public_html folder. However, it appears that all files and folders in the folder are also owned by root:
~/public_html > ll
total 41764
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7064211 Jun filename
....more files.....
Could you please chown recursively using the -R option so that all files and folders in my public_html directory are returned to me? Thanks again for your help.
------------------------------------------------------------
Slavik Koshelev about 20 min later.....
Dear customer,
everything is done.
---------------------
Best regards,
Slavik Koshelev.
Support Team
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Man what a PITA. Everything eventually got fixed, but if this had been 2 years ago and I'd known less about *NIX, I bet this crap would have lasted for at least a couple days....
