Suck it. Suck it long and suck it hard. I grew disgusted with your ’service’ months and months ago after outages, slowness, non-communication and general incompetance on your part. I have the sneaking suspicion that your entire company is run by one sleazy dude in his Mom’s basement. Every correspondance i have ever received has had ONE guys name attached to it. Case in point, an e-mail i received early this morning:
Moloth, Thank you for your continued support of VizaWeb.com. These past couple weeks have been a trying time for VizaWeb and I want to take the time to fill you in as much as possible as to what happened, why it took so long to resolve, and what we are and will be doing to regain your confidence.
The week prior to September 8th was a very good week for VizaWeb. Outages were at a minimum thanks in many parts to new systems like the System Integrity Monitor (SIM), the Process Resource Monitor (PRM) and Brute Force Detection engine (BFD). These systems, like others with VizaWeb monitor the servers and the processes on them to ensure optimal flawless delivery of web content to your site visitors. VizaWeb support response time was also very short. Tickets were getting full response very shortly after they were submitted.
On 9/8 the domain name vizaweb.com became unavailable to us. This is an issue that we are actually still working with the domain registrar on as well as other responsible 3rd party individuals. While we were not the responsible party for the outage that ensued after the domain name went down, we are responsible to you, our client, to ensure a speedy recovery and compensation for our breach in the Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Because our server hostnames and DNS servers were sub-domains of vizaweb.com, i.e. unix1.vizaweb.com and unix2.vizaweb.com, they became unavailable as well. On the same day as the outage, we registered and activated ns1.vizaweb-dns.com and ns2.vizaweb-dns.com as our name servers and unix#.vizawebservers.com as the server host names. We were also able to modify every domain name registered with our providers under us to the new name servers. If your domain name is not currently with us as a domain name registrar, and you haven’t changed your name servers yet, please make that change as soon as possible. This may fix any outstanding issues you may currently have. For your reference, the name servers are:
ns1.vizaweb-dns.com
ns2.vizaweb-dns.com
Many of you also experienced an email outage lasting longer than a site outage. This was due mainly to the needed hostname change for the servers as well as the Reverse DNS (rDNS) entry of each server.
We are under the impression now that your site and email are working. If this is not the case, please respond to this email with your domain name and any error message you may be receiving.
I want to apologize profusely for the issues this has caused everyone. We are working with our partners to both resolve this situation and to put together a compensation package for you. This is being drawn up still and I hope to give you more details soon, but it will most likely be in the coming weeks. Any account that you have active with us today and is active on that later date will receive a credit.
Just a reminder, but please change your cPanel password if you haven’t already within the past 2 weeks.
I am also reactivating phone support starting Monday September 25th. Initially, the hours will be 9a – 5p PST M-F. The tech support like is 651-204-3910.
Again, my deepest apologize for the huge inconvenience this has caused you. I assure you we will regain your confidence. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.
Sincerely,
Rick Mueller
VizaWeb Inc.
Generated by VizaWeb Inc
That, coupled with VizaWebs lack of security:
Hello,
Due to a major attack launched on our network, we have disabled FTP access until further notice. Please note, you can still access your account through secure ftp (sftp) and ssh. Secure FTP is very much the same as regular FTP and can be configured in almost all FTP clients using sftp, ssh, or secure ftp as the connection protocol, and port 22. Normal FTP passwords are communicated with the server in plain text. With secure FTP, only your primary cPanel username and password will work and I would suggest that you immediately log into cPanel and change your password to prevent future misuse if your password was obtained.
A hacker has sniffed our network for FTP passwords. Since FTP passwords are sent in plain text, this is a relatively easy thing to do and unfortunately there is no way to really protect against password sniffing except for disabling FTP altogether. We also recommend that you use the secure version of cPanel and web mail when accessing your account. I have enabled this on all domains. Please ignore the expired SSL cert warnings. We are scrambling to get these updated as soon as possible.
On compromised accounts, the hacker has uploaded a snippet of JavaScript to index.htm, index.html, or index.php files in the public_html folder only. A good way to tell if it has been compromised is if the file was updated today, 09/05/2006. If you find that your file was compromised, please immediately remove the file and upload a new file from backup. If you need to download a backup from your site, please log into cPanel, click on backup, and then the daily button to obtain your backup from Monday morning. This backup will be updated tomorrow morning, so it is a good idea to look into this immediately. The other way to fix your site if it has been compromised would be to download the hacked file and remove the snippet of JavaScript at the end of the file; then re-upload.
We are currently working with our datacenter to investigate the hacker’s identity. This is top priority for us, so please understand if there is a minor delay in responding support tickets. For those of you that were told an email update was coming about the spam issues on the network, that email is still scheduled for tomorrow.
If you have any questions on this or any other issue, please submit a support ticket through your member’s area.
Thanks,
Rick Mueller
VizaWeb Inc.
Generated by VizaWeb Inc
It’s clear to me that VizaWeb is negligently incompetent. All of their contact info is completely useless. The telephone numbers automatically go to a voicemessage instructing you to e-mail them, no one ever replies to e-mails and they do not even list a physical street address on any of their company info. These people seem like scam-artists to me. Even though my webspace with VizaWeb is still paid up for a few months, i wouldn’t host pictures of my dog there (and i don’t even OWN a dog). As quickly as i could, i got my domain name registrar changed and found a new hosting company.
For the last 6 months or so, Surpass Hosting has done an excellent job… minimal downtimes, good ways to communicate with the company and other customers, great rates and no freaking drama. Vizaweb sucks. Big time.
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