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Time to rebuild my host spread

Tyler said:
I'm so/so on this. It depends on how they were actually hacked, but if it was over something stupid like insecure passwords/etc then yes they should be removed from the list.
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It can happen, I agree, but take a look at any of the big hosts out there, and tell me how many times entire servers or entire banks of servers have been hacked, and said data deleted. When is the last time that happened to Hostgator, or Bluehost, or GoDaddy, etc.? And those huge hosts are most likely under constant attack, just due to their sheer size and reputation.

The only saving grace for these folks is that apparently the only servers that were hacked are their free servers. But since they also run a paid hosting service, it's kinda scary that the same techs who couldn't secure the free servers are running the paid servers as well. Personally, if I was with Crosswinds, I'd be looking for a new host real fast.
 
Between you two, it's certainly news, which is why I posted it. I don't know the "technics" of the hack. I'm of two minds - one, it took me the better part of 3 years to find FIVE hosts who last more than a year, (hat tip with no malice to you wswd who would have won the top tier but declined for other reasons), and two, presuming he fixed his hole, is he "more secure than ever now?"

To that second question, I hope so, I'm in the (minority?) who has perfect backups, so I don't have a scoring penalty defined in my system for a security breach. Bad, yes, but it feels like a "3.1 on my 3.7 scale". My study was designed against total live or die failure metrics, not "managerial decisions". So yes Cwahi gets a NASTY penalty, but in my view, just barely not enough to be dropped.
 
To wswd valid point, my study had no focus on Paid Side vs Free Side of the same company. Yes, it's a loss of faith when the free side goes down, but let's say ( in 10? ) that the free side, being free, might be missing some obscure piece of high end protection the Paid side has, so it (just so in this case) went down faster than the Paid side. That wouldn't make me happy but I could "justify it" under twisted business logic.
 
masterbo said:
And when contacted directly and asked about the incident, what they respond?
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I didn't get into that, I took more of a "business manager" view of all this and say it doesn't matter to me precisely what error they made, only that they failed to block it. Total results were bad news, quoting from over there, "A couple partitions where hit accounting for approximately 400-450GB of data. That covered thousands of accounts."

So they're definitely down a notch, if I had the energy I'd re-do the board and put them last behind IsMyWebsite. I will now only recommend them for special use cases involving high-bandwidth sites. It's been an interesting test of my rules. I'm quite unhappy about the incident, but my study is close to binary live-or-die at the company level, so they squeak past that rule by the skin of their teeth.
 
Public Formal Non-FWS Study Version

Okay gang,

As of about 6-1-2012 for even round date purposes, I am preparing a more formal writeup of my study with my public recommendations. Yes, the first crucial metric here was targetted against the Fly-By-Night crowd, but with my initial results in, it is time to tighten things even more. cWahi's data loss event is pretty bad, and a couple of the other hosts are invitation-only, so soon (at my slow pace!) there will be a new board posted that will look quite different.

Also, I have taken a quite informal post approach here while events unfolded, but in the writeup, while I am not a trained academic, I will use a much more formal language style.
 
masterbo said:
Well, I am curious, where the current list/scroll/tome of your study can be seen?
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Hi Masterbo. There isn't a chart (yet?) of timelines per applied host. It's a great idea, it could provide industry data, but I am the kind of guy that once "dragged into a project", has trouble getting back out of it again. Very long term, that's the kind of thing I'd put into a 10 page paper on what I found. For the main first stage, the final leader board of who remains as a Recommended Host was the original goal output of the project, which I completed successfully.

Maybe one day I will put together a chart. To do the amusing "live" version, go to the start of the thread, and medium-quickly skim the whole thread (perhaps in a couple of hours.) You'll see hosts come, hosts fail, updates, and then near the end as I start to tie it all down, the winner board emerges.
 
Major Board Update 9-15-2012

All right! After a chunk of time has passed since the last update, a few things have happened. RLS Hosting seems to be gone, and even if they come back, by now this is one too many incidents, so I cannot recommend them.

The results are now on a standalone page.

http://www.freevoteusa.com/WebHostFAQ.html

The active monitor bars have been turned off. By this point the hosts have proven themselves, so they have earned a little respite. (However, like RLS, if I discover a site has failed, they will be removed.) Also which "round" a host was in no longer matters anymore either. These are all solid hosts.

In my new writeup, I did note CWahi's severe security incident, however they remain on the list because it is after all a durability study. (However if I happen to notice if they incur a second incident, I will remove them via demerits.)

Instead, some of the hosts are de-emphasizing the free plans, so I have listed them as "Request Basis".
 
Seraphim said:
Hey Tao, you might want to take a look at this.

http://www.freewebspace.net/forums/...-free-hosting-for-a-personal-website-amp-blog

OP of that thread is saying that they are looking for hosting again because their sites on IsMyWebsite are down. We might need to check up on them.

Edit: Hey, taophoenix.ismywebsite.com is showing an account suspended message. Might be time to give them a ring and see what happened.
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((Cross-posted))

NoelF1 said:
Hi guys, it's been quite a long time since I've browsed around here for some hosting as I used to get hosted by ismywebsite.

Now that ismywebsite hosting is down and I've completely lost my website...
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Interesting situation for the project. I'm pretty sure the company is up at the macro level. For example this page below seems to be a "live review" with one as recently as Monday. (And the page itself loads.)

They seem to be moving towards a Paid system, but if you have a ... (cringes at this next word!) ... Sponsor (!!), then that's how you get free hosting. It would have been nice to get a note though with an account suspension warning. I didn't see one in my email and of course not one here. Not sure what happened to Noel's account either, but my best guess is they bulldozed a lot of lesser accounts that didn't either get a sponsor or something. My "coupon" for placement on this project was supposed to be permanent to the best of my understanding, because I seem to remember (and could probably dig up if I really looked hard) a conversation on that very topic. Which is - a fundamental principle of the study was to have no activity/frequency/ad requirements to keep it from becoming a managerial bickering match.

So all told, I believe if you found a Sponsor, the company is up, but this is enough for me to remove them from my Recommended list. I wouldn't know how to easily get myself a Sponsor without a lot of fancy Yahoo-ing and maybe emailing existing clients and asking, etc.

Good Catch Seraphim. Heh ... "Sun sets on another host".

I'll fix the board in a few days when I get to it.
 
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