Technical Difficulties
You may have noticed last week that this site went dark for a few days. Or, considering my posting frequency, you may not have noticed anything different at all.
About a week ago, I got an email from my web host (Lunarpages) letting me know that the contact script I was using for my contact form had been exploited and that they had temporarily renamed it until I could fix the problem. Apparently the script had been hijacked by spammers who were using it to send a bunch of crap to AOL members. Which, thinking about it, doesn’t really seem all that terrible, considering the huge pain in the ass most AOL users are.
I was a little surprised, but it didn’t seem like a huge issue. That is, until a few minutes later when I received another email from Lunarpages labeled “URGENT” notifying me that my account had been suspended. They didn’t give a reason or any details, only that it had been suspended, and that I needed to contact them. I assumed that the suspension had something to do with the exploited contact script, but I didn’t have a clue how that had escalated into my account being taken offline in only a matter of minutes.
Lunarpages only has phone support during regular business hours, and this was late in the evening on Sunday, so I opened a trouble ticket on their website to figure out what was happening. Then I waited for a response. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. Nothing. No response, no acknowledgement that there was an issue, no message to say that they had read my ticket, nothing. Their support chat said it was “temporarily unstaffed”. Out of options, I waited some more, and then went to bed sometime well after midnight.
The next morning before leaving for work, I checked my trouble ticket again, and someone had posted a response asking for my security code. This was about 12 hours after I had posted my original message. Uh, 24/7 tech support? So I provided the security code, and left for work. I checked the site during the day, but there were no further responses. After I got home that evening, and noticed that there was still no response, I called tech support. The guy told me that phone support hours were over in about 5 minutes. At that point, I was averaging more than 12 hours between responses. That is assuming that you count ME calling THEM as a response.
The guy on the phone was nice enough, but basically said that Wordpress was causing the problem. Older versions of Wordpress (1.2.x and earlier) are vulnerable to a worm that is (or was) going around, and somehow the exploited contact script led somebody at Lunarpages to believe that the entire Wordpress install was being exploited. This guy’s manager apparently said I needed to install something else that mimicked Wordpress since it wasn’t secure. I laughed about that for a while. You know, during the times when I wasn’t inventing new profanity.
The problem is, Wordpress wasn’t even an issue. The contact script was completely separate from any of my Wordpress files, but these guys thought it was all part of the same package. No, it turns out this site is a bunch of different parts, all held together with a lot of spackle. Oh, and guess what? I’ve been running WP 1.5.x since February. The new version. The new, safe, version. Since FEBRUARY.
Their solution (as told to me on the phone) was to upgrade to the very latest version of Wordpress, and delete the bad contact script and then they would unsuspend my account. The problem with that was that my account access had been locked, so I couldn’t even get to the files to make changes. The support guy said someone was going to allow me temporary access in the next few minutes, so I could make the necessary changes, and then I could post on the support ticket, and they would unsuspend my account.
So I got off the phone, and waited for that to happen. This was around 7pm. I waited, and waited, and waited some more. Nothing. I went to bed around 2am and I still couldn’t access my account, and Lunarpages wouldn’t respond to my messages on the support ticket.
They finally brought my account back online sometime later the next day. It was just about the most frustrating experience I think I could have had in that situation, excluding having the exact same thing drag out for more than a couple of days.
It’s not the time it took, and it’s not the action they took (even if it didn’t make any sense), it was the fact there was almost no communication. Yes, I don’t post on here everyday, and yes, I’ve got plenty of other stuff going on, but if this site goes down, for whatever reason, I want to know why, and I want to know right away. And if you are a web host, and you can’t manage to do that, then you need to get into another business. Or at least stop crowing about your 24/7 tech support, or how much you value the customer experience.
Oh, and next time you reinstate a suspended account, how about NOT deleting the contents of the .htaccess file? That’s kind of important in a whole “making things work around here” kind of way. Okay? Thanks.
