I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

Client: Can you provide some kind of guaranteed timeline that you're going to be able to move our website to our new servers with the optimizations implemented? I know you said it should take a week, but we have 3 weeks to get this moved over and we cannot afford to be double billed. I'm waiting to fire up the new server until you can confirm.

Me: As I said, it SHOULD take about a week, but that's factoring in ONLY the modifications being made for optimization and a QA call to review the website. This does not account for your hosting provider needing to spin up a new server.

We also never offered to move your website over to said new server. I sent detailed instructions for your provider to move a copy of the entire website over and have it configured and ready to point your domain over to, in order to save time and money since your provider won't give us the access necessary to perform a server-to-server transfer. If you are implying that I need to move the website over myself, you will be billed for that migration, however long it takes.

Client: So you're telling me that we paid $950 for 10 hours of work and that DOESN'T include making the changes live?

Me: Why would you think that the 10 hours that we're logged for the process of optimizing your website include additional time that has not been measured? When you build out a custom product for a customer, do you eat the shipping charges to deliver it? That is a rhetorical question of course, because I know you charge for shipping as well. My point is that we charge for delivery just as you do, because it requires our time and manpower.

All of this could have been avoided, but you are the one that enforced the strict requirement that we cannot take the website down for even 1 hour during off-peak times to incorporate the changes we made on our testbed, so we're having to go through this circus in order to deliver the work we performed.

I'm not going to give you a guarantee of any kind because there are too many factors that are not within our control, and we're not going to trap ourselves so you have a scapegoat to throw under the bus if your boss looks to you for accountability. I will reiterate that we estimate it would take about a week to implement, test and run through a full QA together, as we have other clients within our queue and our time must be appropriately blocked out each day. However, the longer you take to pull the trigger on this new server, the longer it will take on my end to get the work scheduled within the queue.

Client: If we get double billed, we're taking that out of what we have remaining to pay you.

Me: On the subject of paying us, you signed a contract acknowledging that you would pay us the remaining 50% after you approved the changes, which you did last week, in order for us to deliver the project. Thank you for the reminder that your remaining balance has not yet been paid. I'll have our CFO resend the invoice for you to remit payment before we proceed any further.

---

I love it when clients give me shit. I just give it right back.

> *WordPress website gets down Error 500: Cannot establish Connection with database*

> Marketing loses their shit: "We need the website up and working right now"

> *Me being calm *: "Nope, we cannot it's the service provider error, there's nothing we can do"

> *MK.G*: "Alright then, switch to another ISP ASAP"

> *Me, Internal rage, a volcano erupts *: "Umm..so you want to spend more money on another hosting because this one has an outage of 48 hours?"

>*MK.G *: "Yes, because we cannot run Facebook ads, just because website is down"

>*Internal lmao*: "Alright, but by the time you purchase a new service provider and host, the website will be up and running plus since the database is down we cannot migrate"

>*MK.G*: "I don't care, just make it up and working"

>*Me chilling*: "Alright, give me few hours"

> after a few hours the website is working *me being badass even though I didn't do anything*

Let me tell you a story:
One upon a time poor lil PonySlaystation received a call. It was a nice guy who cried about his WordPress website had been hacked. So the clusterfuck began...

He gave me the login credentials for the hosting back-end, DB, FTP and CMS.
A hacked WP site was not new for me. It was probably the 6th of maybe 10 I had to do with.
What I didn't expect was the hosting back-end.
Imagine yourself back in 1999 when you tried to learn PHP and MySQL and all was so interesting and cool and you had infinite possibilities! Now forget all these great feelings and just take that ancient technology to 2018 and apply it to a PAID FUCKING HOSTING PROVIDER!
HOLY FUCKING ASSRAPE!
Wanna know what PHP version?
5.3.11, released the day before gomorrah was wiped.
The passwords? Stored in fucking plaintext. Shown right next to the table name and DB user name in the back-end. Same with FTP users.
EXCUSE ME, WHAT THE FUCK?!

I have to call Elon Musk and order some Boring Company Flame Throwers to get rid of this.

Long story long, I set up a new WP, changed all passwords and told the nice guy to get a decent hoster.

Because of hardware failure we had to move some vpns from one datacenter to another.

The team of highly untrained monkeys at my hosting provider were hired to do this. First they ran backups of all the systems. Then they started the moving process. A few hours later they were done. We got an email everything was back online.

So we restarted all our processes and no data was coming in from our Raspberry's around the country. So we start a little investigation. What did these buffons do, they changed our rsa keys.

So we kindly ask them to put the old keys back so we do not have to fix 200 changed key warnings on systems that are not remotely accesible.

Apperently something that can't be done because their back up process is automated and always makes new keys.

Holy fucking fuck, whats the point in having a backup its not an exact copy. Is this fucking normal?

Now I will be spending the next few weeks literally standing in cow shit reconnecting Raspberry's.

Thanks a fucking lot. Not!

!rant

So I am building a website and already finished it and ready to be deployed.
Got server access and found that there are many other websites files and folder.

Note : multiple copies of website that I am working on.

So I raise my concern with client about which folder is actually handling the website. She contact the old dev guy and got the webroot for that website. She told me to delete everything and clean it up and make tge current websites available.

I realize that there are many other websites may rely on those files and folder and inform about the consequences. And finally told her I will not touch any files except for the website I am working on.

So, I deployed the website and works good as expected. After 3 weeks clients comes back with an issue that one of her websites is notworking and trying to blame me for it.

Fyi : before my deploymemt she says that she will talk to hosting providers to clean their webspace. I am not sure on that yet.

So I tried to do auditing and found that after 2 days frm my deployment some has already wiped everything from those other websites.
I showed my audits and its someone did it.
You should contact your hosting provider or the other dev who she contacted for wiping.

From the begining I am telling that lady to take backups. She said no need.

The reason I didnt took it because I am not working on those website and obviously client isnt going to pay me for those back.

There is still more to go waiting for her resonses.

fucking hostgator!

go suck a cock you developers!

everything from their payment system to their support is crap.

a few days ago, i purchased a website from hostgator, with a year of hosting during black friday weekend. i had obtained a black friday coupon code that entitled me to roughly $160 off its usual price. that said, i filled out the registration form and clicked the 'checkout' button.

right after i clicked it, i saw i forgot to put in the coupon code, and pressed the back button on my browser. then i put in the code and proceeded with checkout.

guess what?

those MOTHERFUCKING GREEDY ASS BITCHES charged me TWICE, one with the coupon and one without.

i contacted customer support and told them what happened after waiting about double the time i was supposed to be connected to support.

of course, they asked for my fucking "security" pin over the customer support live chat (totally not ironic).

they sent a confirmation email, and cancelled the payment without the coupon.

then ONE FUCKING DAY LATER, I tried to connect to my website.

MY SITE WAS FUCKING SUSPENDED.

die in a hole.

i contacted customer support once more, and after explaining the story, I had to wait four to eight hours.

i'll see how it turns out tomorrow.

die in a hole hostgator🖕

Does anyone know a free hosting that support .net core web api without credit card? It’s just for a school project. IBM Bluemix only supports normal web app and azure needs credit card

Fucking fuck you STRATO. This cancer of a german hosting provider just should be shutdown for crimes against reason. Our website got infected by some shit (I'd like to not state why, there is only so much pressure my main arterie can handle) and now we are supposed to remove that file. Well they blocked all incoming and outgoing traffic to the server so we cannot connect via sftp, the only choice you got with STRATO. And they wont restore network access for the server unless we remove the file. No logical loop to see here citizen, please move on.

So my client wants to stick with their current hosting provider (Bell) because the company is "big" and "won't go anywhere anytime soon." I just said, well okay it can't be that bad. Bell charges about 10x more and gives you about 10x less compared to other options, but it's not my money so whatever. Well, Bell has the absolute worst customer service. They have an online support form where I can type in my questions and they will call me within a day to help me. They called me during work hours and I missed the call, so they sent me an email to let me know I missed the call and gave me a number to call. I called and I might as well have called my dog because the support didn't even know what a .htaccess file is. I emailed them back and asked if they could forward my email to someone in the hosting department that could help (because the phone support I got was shit). I got a reply saying they "can't"... yup, they used the word "can't", they can't forward the email and that I would have to call. Is everyone at Bell a fucking dick chugging brainless pile of moldy-ass shit biscuits!? YOU CAN"T SEND AN EMAIL? Turns out they do have a dedicated hosting support email, let's hope the email I send ends up in front of someone at Bell who at least has a slight clue how to use a keyboard.

Rant: THAT FUCKING CREATIVE AGENCY, THAT USES A FUCKING HOSTING PROVIDER, THAT DOESN'T OFFER SSH! GUESS WHO'S CURRENTLY UPLOADING 4000 FILES? BEST OF ALL EVERY 200-ISCH FILES THE CONNECTION GET'S REFUSED, TELLING, THERE ARE TO MANY REQUESTS (FileZilla is set to max 2 simultanious uploads, still the same)

FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCK OF A CRAPPY DEPLOYMENT PROCESS.

Worst exp. on a collab/group project?

Had a few, here is one.

Worked with a dev team (of two devs) in Norway to begin collaboration on providing a portal into our system (placing orders, retrieving customer info, inventory control, etc)

They spoke very good English, but motivation was the problem. Start the day around 10:00AM...take a two hour lunch...ended the day at, if I was lucky, 4:00PM (relative to Norway time). Response time to questions took days, sometimes weeks. We used Skype, which helped, but everything was "Yea...I'll do that tomorrow...waiting on X....I have a wedding to go to, so I'll finish my part next week."

I didn't care so much, I had other projects to do, but the stakeholders pounded me almost everyday demanding a progress report (why aren't you done yet...etc..etc.)
The badgering got so bad I told the project owner (a VP) if he wanted this project done by the end of the year, the company would have to fly me to Norway so I personally push things along.
When real money was on the line, he decided patience was warranted.

A 3 month project turned into 9, and during a phone meeting with the CEO in December
O: "Thanks guys, this project is going great. We'll talk again in February. Bye."
PM: "Whoa...what! February!"
<sounding puzzled>
O: "Um..yes? It's Christmas time. Don't you Americans take off for Christmas?"
PM: "Yes, but not until Christmas. Its only December 12th. Your taking the whole month of December and January for Christmas?"
O:"Yes, of course. You Americans work too hard. You should come over here and see how we celebrate. Takes about a month so we can ease back into the flow of things."
<Jack is the VP>
PM: "Jack wanted this project completed by the end of the year, that is what everyone agreed to."
O:"Yes, I suppose, but my plane is waiting on me. Not to worry, everything will be fine."
<ceo hangs up>
PM: "Oh shit..oh shit..oh shit. What are you going to do!?"
Me: "Me!?..not a darn thing. Better go talk with Jeff."
<Jeff is the VP>
J: "This is unacceptable. You promised this project would only take a few months. I told you there would be consequences for not meeting the deadline."
PM:"But..but...its not our fault."
J: "I don't care about fault. I care about responsibility. I've never had to fire anyone for not meeting a deadline, but .."
Me: "Jeff, they are in Norway and no one is working this project for the next two months. You've known for months about them dragging their asses on this project. We're ready to go. Services have been tested and deployed. Accounting has all the payment routing ready. Only piece missing is theirs."
J: "Oh. OK. Great job guys. I guess we'll delay this project until February."
<leave the office>
PM: "Holy shit I'm glad you were there. I thought I was fired."
Me: "Yea, and that prick would have done it not giving a crap that it's Christmas."
<fast forward to Feb>
O: "Our service provider fell through, so I'm hosting with another company. You guys know PHP? Perl? I don't know what they called it, but it sounded so cool I bought the company."
PM: "You bought what? Are we still working with Z and B?"
O:"Yea, sort of. How's your German? New guy only speaks German."
PM: "Um, uh... no one here speaks German"
O:"Not to worry, I speak German, French, and Italian. I'll be your translator."
PM: "What? French and Italian?"
O: "On my trip to France I connected with a importer who then got me in touch with international shipper in Italy. I flew over there and met a couple really smart guys than can help us out. My new guy only speaks German, J only speaks French, and R speaks Italian, Russian, and a little English. Not to worry, I'm full time on this project. You have my full attention."

We believe the CEO has/had some serious mental issues, including some ADD. He bailed within the first month (took another vacation to Sweden to do some fishing) and left me using Google Translate to coordinate the project. Luckily, by the end, the Norwegian company hired a contractor from England who spoke German and hobbled together the final integration.

Calling a client's hosting provider to switch on a feature because shell is jailed.

I bought hosting and domain last year, I uploaded my site and left it for months. Last month I logged onto my webhost's user panel and the "login to cpanel" option of my hosting directed me to someone else's premium hosting, I realised it late and I had already deleted whole of the WP site as I presumed it was mine. I left the database intact, reached out to the domain owner getting the info via whois, surprisingly he is was all fine losing his merchant navy academy website.

However, I WAS NOT FINE because I am not fucking expecting my webhost to give someone access to my hosting, just like I got access to his.

Been two weeks and they are unable to fix it and I am pissed off. I had no urgent need but I WANT ACCESS WHEN I WANT.

They are not as big as GoDaddy but they are a reputed hosting provider in my country with nice and fancy WP domain etc management portal and everything. I never expected this from then. How the fuck would they let this happen.

I provide hosting for my clients. About 3 months ago I discovered that the hosting company that I'd been using had been swallowed up by EIG, which explained why the tech support had gone downhill.

So, I jumped to another hosting company. Same shit different company!

Apparently the fact that my browsers sit at "connecting" for up to 30 seconds, and I get a "could not connect to" message half the time while I'm trying to fucking work on a deadline is the fault of some plug-in in a WordPress installation!

Oh yeah? Why then does this shit happen when I'm working on a pure html/css site?
Why then did it start happening after they "updated" my shared server?!

Oh, but the bastards suggest that I buy Cloudflare or pay for more space!

You fuckers made my work take 3 times as long, and you made an important migration fail!

Network places make mistakes. We all do. That's cool. Fucking own up to it, talk to me like a techie, and DON'T TRY TO BLAME IT ON ME OR MY TOOLS!

Fuck you! I think I'm gonna give Google Cloud a try, and do this shit myself!

The internet is expensive as hell compared with salaries, we can't access to services like amazon, google cloud, gitlab, private github, Android, and a lot more because of USA sanctions (we have to do some magic and sorcery to use them), and in the other hand our government applys restrictive laws (we call it the double embargo) like that one who says that you can't host services for the country with international providers, and the only national hosting provider has a terrible, feature-less and super expensive service. But hey, we like a lot what we do!!

- Cuba

A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.

Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.

Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.

Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.

So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.

Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.

Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.

So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.

You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.

Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.

Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?

Despite common sense, I think technology is not making our lives easier. It's just build chaos on top of chaos.

Take server-side programming for instance.

First you have to find someone to host your thing, or a PaaS provider. Then you have to figure out how much RAM and storage you need, which OS you're going to use. And then there's Docker (which will run on top of a VM on AWS or GCP anyway, making even less sense). And then there's the server technology: nginx, Apache (and many many more; if, that is, you're using a server at all). And then there are firewalls, proxies, SSL. And then you go back to the start, because you have to check if your hosting provider will support the OS or Docker or your server. (I smell infinite recursion here.)

Each of these moving parts come with their own can of worms in terms of configuration and security. A whole bible to read if you want to have the slightest clue about what you're doing.

And then there's the programming language to use and its accompanying frameworks. Can they replace the server technology? Should you? Will they conflict with each other and open yet another backdoor into your system? Is it supported by your hosting provider? (Did I mention an infinite recursion somewhere?)

And then there's the database. Does it have a port to the language/framework of your choosing? Why does it expose an web interface? Is it supposed to replace your server? And why are its security features optional again? (Just so I have to test both the insecure and the secure environments?)

And you haven't written a single line of code yet, mind you.

I was just writing a long rant about how my rant style changed, and how I could fix anything that annoys me in a heartbeat by just putting my mind to implementing a change. Then YouTube once again paused the synth mix that was playing on my laptop in the background, with that stupid "Video paused. Continue watching?" pop-up. I even installed an add-on for it in Firefox to make it automatically click that away. I guess that YouTube did yet another bullshit update to break that, for "totally legitimate user interface improvements" or whatever. Youtube-dl faces similar challenges all the time, and it's definitely not alone in that either. I also had issues with that on Facebook when I wanted to develop on top of that, where the UI changes every other day and the API even changes every other week. And as far as backwards compatibility goes, our way or the highway!

So I did the whole "replace and move on" type of thing. I use youtube-dl often now to get my content off YouTube into a media player that doesn't fuck me over for stupid reasons like "ad fraud" (I use an ad blocker you twats, what ads am I gonna fraud against), or "battery savings" (the damn laptop is plugged in and fully topped up for fucks sake, and you do this crap even on desktop computers). Gee I wonder why creators are moving on to Floatplane and Nebula nowadays, and why people like yours truly use "highly illegal" youtube-dl. Oh and thank you for putting me in Saudi Arabia again. Pinnacle of data mining, machine learning and other such wank could not do GeoIP. for a server that used to be in a datacenter in Italy for years, and recently has been moved to another hosting provider in Germany. It's about as unchanging and static, and as easy to geolocate as you can possibly get. But hey, kill off another Google+ when?

Like seriously, yes I'm taking your Foobar challenges and you may very well be the company I end up working for. But if anything it feels like there's a shitton of stuff to fix. And the challenges themselves still using Python 2.7 honestly feels like the seldom seen tip of the iceberg.

Today my fellow @EaZyCode found out a local Hosting Provider has a massive security breach.

He wrote an Plugin for Minecraft with an own file explorer and the ability to execute runtime commands over it.

We discovered that this specific hosting provider stores the ftp passwords one level above the FTP-Root. In FUCKING PLAIN TEXT! AND THE MYSQL PASSWORD TOO! And even more shit is stored there ready to be viewed by intelligent people...

It's one of the fucking biggest Hosting provider Germanys!

But, because EaZyCode has such a great mind and always find such bugs, I give him the title "Providers Endboss" today, he has earned it.

Loving you ❤️

Edit: we used SendMail with runtime commands and sended too many empty Spammails (regret noting)

What is the best hosting provider that is most likely to survive ww3?

Just found a nice hosting provider that actually have some customers in the taxi and transport segment.

The provider offer emailsservices, webhosting, dns services. So far so good.

The only problem that I can find here is that everything is hosted on one single IP.
The DNS-servers, the mail server and webserver is one fucking server.

Why am I sad, depressed, demotivated, you ask?
Because I was asked to create-react-app with nodemailer, it worked well on heroku, YAYYY MEE, "

"NOTHING GOES WRONG IN DEPLOYMENT FUCK YEAH"

Little did I know that was a "demo" for the business people, My superior / manager/boss wants me to deploy on 1and1 service provider,

> Okay 1 and 1 service provider does provide Nodej, so it shouldn't be hard.
> Turns out it is a Windows hosting server IIS 10 without URL Rewrite.
> *INTERNAL SCREAMING*
I went up to him to talk about this issue and requested to let me talk to 1 and 1, and get this sorted

> But bro, if we cannot fix it, I think they also cannot fix, probably.

*INTERNAL SCREAMING AT PEAK*

I just want URL Rewrite installed on IIS10 so that I can move on to the next project.
A little background for this project
> No support from him during development.

> I personally used HD Images, because why not?

> Website seems slow because of HD Images, and now he complains about it.

You fucking (managers) want a website to be scalable and fast and yet you choose to focus on B U S I N E S S instead of support the real guy.

I'm fucking sick and tired, it took me 24 hours figure out the issue because there is nothing on 1 and 1 support/ forum/help center.

Another 24 hours to try and fix, yet no luck.

I'm gonna finally point the domain name to heroku. Fuck, I'm so fucking done

Me: "can you please send my credentials for the database?"

Hosting provider: "Yea sure... We will set it up on our servers in no time"

*5 mins later: provider sends mail to me*

Me: *looks at mail*

Also me: *NOTHING TO DO HERE*

Congrats to jweiland.net for not being able to support their customers.

!dev && rant

Looking for a song's lyrics... A very complicated task apparently. Blinding Lights by The Weeknd for whoever's interested.

Firefox: just one small thing to keep going, sorry we just updated our CA certs again. Screw you, close the browser. I will not restart it for you but I will tell you that I would. When you restart the browser, you will lose whatever search you were just doing. Sucks for you bastard! Enjoy the update.

Go to Genius Lyrics, please turn on JavaScript to run this "app". Done that? Okay now solve this CAPTCHA please. Um.. let me just leave that ingenious site.

Next one, AZ Lyrics: Yeah sorry your IP is from a hosting provider, but we will not tell you that is the reason. You've just been denied access to the site. See you next time! Everyone using a VPS to make a VPN connection with is obviously an abuser after all.

Finally found the lyrics on lyrics.com after a long journey that was way more complicated than it should've been. It's a good song.

Oh and Firefox consumed well over a GB for just a single tab of course...
I want Gopher, BBS, IRC and the likes back.

Beware: Here lies a cautionary tale about shared hosting, backups, and -goes without saying- WordPress.

1. Got a call from a client saying their site presented an issue with a third-party add-on. The vendor asked us to grant him access to our staging copy.

2. Their staging copy, apparently, never got duplicated correctly because, for security reasons, their in-house dev changed the name of the wp-content folder. That broke their staging algo. So no staging site.

3. In order to recreate the staging site, we had to reset everything back to WP defaults. Including, for some reason, absolute paths inside the database. A huge fucking database. Because WordPress.

4. Made the changes directly in a downloaded sql file. Shared hosting, obviously, had an upload limit smaller to the actual database.

5. Spent half an hour trying to upload table by table to no avail.

6. In-house uploads a new, fixed database with the help of the shared hosting provider.

7. Database has the wrong path. Again.

8. In-house performs massive Find and Replace through phpMyAdmin on the production server.

9. Obviously, MySQL crashes instantly and the site gets blocked for over 3 hours for exceeding shared hosting limits.

10. Hosting provider refuses to accept this was caused by such a stupid act and says site needs to be checked because queries are too slow.

11. We are gouging our eyeballs as we see an in-house vs. hosting fight unfold. So we decide to watch a whole Netflix documentary in between.

12. Finally, the hosting folds and enables access to the site, which is obvi not working because, you know, wrong paths.

13. Documentary finishes. We log in again, click restore from backup. Go to bed. Client phones to bless us. Client’s in-house dev probably looking for a cardboard box to pack his stuff first thing in the morning. \_(ツ)_/¯

Uh-oh I fucked up.

Not at work, but with my website where I had an email forwarder to an external address. The forwarding was everything so that I could do the spam filtering and occasional check in one place. Unfortunately, that triggered the spam detection at the external address (after some years!), and my provider ended up on a blacklist.

That got me a pretty angry mail from my hosting provider who had already disabled the forwarding and wanted to make sure that I understood the issue and would not put it in again.

I thought about whether they had fucked up because it was even possible to do that, or whether I had fucked up because I should have known. Hm yeah I opted for the latter and apologised.

The support guy seemed happy that I didn't try to argue (possibly like other customers...), and advised that I just should add another account in my email client. Sure, at least that will prevent this shit from happening again.

He also mentioned that every single blacklist issue they had experienced in this year was accidental due to external forwarding issues and that they would consider just disabling it altogether.

Which is probably a smart move, just as hint for these ranters here who work at hosting companies. Or at least only enable external forwarding if spam assassin or so is in place.

Just earlier today I was looking at the hosting packages for a local hosting provider in my country (who shall remain unnamed as I want to work there and criticizing them might not be a very good idea right now) and they start at €250/month apparently. I thought - that's fucking ridiculous!

Like for real, I could literally buy a server for.. I dunno, €600 from the likes of bargainhardware.co.uk with some pretty darn good specs, put it in my home, get a business contract with my ISP for say around €100/month (and use it for my own purposes as well instead of my consumer contract, win-win!), and the server would pay for itself in no more than half a year, probably even less! And you're even getting the actual hardware with it!! And that is for the price of that hosting provider's starting option!!!

Now I know what you're thinking, sure there's more to servers than just the server itself, like redundant power, generators, SLA, multiple routers and switches, and all sorts of failover measures. And you are absolutely right. But does that really justify a rental cost of a server of €250/month?

Not only that, even their shared hosting.. shared hosting, the dreaded, shitty shared hosting! solution is starting at around €10/month. I'm paying about €5/month for 3 light-duty servers and a domain for Christ's sake!

So.. is this hosting provider just expensive as fuck or is this really the industry standard, particularly for the dedicated hosting part? And maybe that's why some services like.. say devRant which apparently gets around €600/month from 299 supporters at the time of writing, yet still has @dfox and @trogus pay from their own wallets for it (if at all possible, please let me know if that's still the case).. I wonder if those costs are all really justifiable?

It just strikes me as odd.. you can get *a lot* of server for a couple hundred bucks if you do it well.. no?

We take over development of a live customer facing system and PM agrees date for our first code deployment with client CIO
Me: The dev and staging environments don't have any test data currently as the old agency screwed it up
PM: Well you better load some
Me: There isn't any... It'll take 10 days to copy prod db due to hosting provider SLAs, leaving 1 week for SIT, UAT and performance testing (assuming they don't screw up)
PM: Well the date is set, 1 week will be enough for testing

A company I work with are reluctant to change their hosting provider until the end of their hosting term. (Which may be a perfect reason as it's paid for)

The website goes down everyday!!!! Not to forget it's a popular magazine website!

Here are the new relic emails at 1 minute intervals:
- HTTP 500 Response Code
- HTTP 508 Response Code
- NetworkError: Read timed out
- Connect to domain:80 failed: connection timed out

Which cloud hosting provider do you use or prefer and why?

I've been using Digital Ocean for two years, but I'm thinking about switching to AWS or Google, because two friends of mine recommended them. For me, at least AWS, feels way more complicated than DO. But if they are clearly better, I will switch. What's your recommendation, if you have any?

Thanks a lot!

I've been fighting with my xmlrant.com hosting provider for a good several days now regarding enabling web deploy for my account.

According to their screenshot it all works, according to my various attempts still getting either 404 or 401 with the same login / server details!

So frustrating... It almost looks as though same authentication works differently for them locally and for me externally... Maybe domain name needs to be in FQDN format... Or smth else... Either way this will probably end up with them saying fuck off, all is working on our end.

And as well it might - it just might be my incompetence... *self-doubt creeping in*

But it's still frustrating nevertheless.

So far I need to settle for unreliable FTP deploy, which introduces big overhead as always copies entire deployment folder, even is only a few files are actually changed.

*Le sigh*

We're looking to change the domain provider we use to register new client's domains to one that has an API.
So far it looks like it'll either be namecheap or AWS's Route 53.
We're also looking for the same thing with mail inboxes.

Do you have any recommendations / experience with either of these?

I was hoping to find a solution that would provide both the domain registration and the mailboxes with no hosting and accessible via API but I've had no such luck.
(Except for maybe two, but neither looked up to date)

Got in a somewhat heated discussion earlier a'd wanted to get some more input...

Friend of mine has a community site for a game, and is running adds to pay for the hosting costs etc... He however has recently changed adds provider and now they've become more profitable but also a lot more obtrusive...

I suggested perhaps looking into getting something like coinhive, mining monero coins with your users browsers... He was really averse to it, but I think that it can be viable alternative to adds, as long as you allow your users to not participate and don't go all out with their processors but throttle it to say 5% orso...

Anyhow, he wouldn't have it, and I was wondering if I was alone in thinking I'd rather have some coins mined using my processor than seeing adds, especially if it's not at full speed, and with consent (and not on mobile)

I have worked in a hosting or sysadmin role for at least 8 years out of my career and managed thousands of servers in very large environments. My team has been shopping around for a new hosting company and has yet to include me on the calls / advisement. The people shopping for a provider... Zero hosting experience. Zero sysadmin experience. Zero applicable experience. Not IT people, not technical. Well I guess it's job security for when things blow up in our faces that I'll need to fix it.

What cheap/good quality node.js hosting provider for nodejs/react/mongodb app do you suggest? (including sale, black friday etc.)

Just came home to cook supper at 11am again before I go back to the office to pull an all nighter to implement last minute changes thanks to a hosting provider in south africa getting hacked last Friday.

I love being a dev but this is one of those moments I really think to myself "your the moron that chose to do this for your career you twit" 😑

Spend weeks porting everything to Docker and automating deployments so we can be cloud provider agnostic...

Hosting providers all want long term contracts.

God, these people...

Little backstory. I'm making an training application and we have a MySQL database set up where some elements of the training are configured. This is so learning experts can easily change some aspects of the training without programmer's help.

Meanwhile, I'm also in the middle of a server migration, because our current server is running a lot of deprecated software and is in dire need of replacement.
This is going pretty slowly, though, because of other, high-priority, work that keeps being shoved my way.

Now, someone accidentally deletes a bunch of data from one of the schemas. No big deal in my book, the training is still in development and we have nightly backups of the database.
So I shoot a support ticket to the hosting provider and ask them to restore a specific schema, telling them to restore the image to some other machine and dump the tables in an MySQL file so I can restore it that way.
I also told them to get the backup of the OLD server, not the NEW one we're still migrating to.

About an hour later, I get a message that they dumped the schema's files in a Temp folder on the D drive. So I RDP to the server to check and... The files aren't there. Just before writing a response asking where the file is, I remembered the server I was migrating to and checked that server, and there were the files.

I had already migrated part of our databases and was testing compatibility before I moved to something else.
The hosting provider just dumped the files of the wrong server, despite me telling them exactly which server to use.

This is not the first time this hosting provider has let me down...
I'm really considering jumping to another if they keep doing this...

When you have to call the priority line of your hosting provider because the site went down and they're only available between 9.00 and 18.00.

They must be joking...

!rant

Need advice guys :)

just bought myself a nice domainname, and now I'm looking for a good email provider I can use for my domain.

Any of you can point me in the right direction? It can come at a price, as long as it is not too much, but I'm well aware quality service does not come free...

where do you guys register your domains? :) i plan to seperated mine from my hosting provider.
namecheap looks good - any pros/cons i have to consider?

Found a nice domain name, and I intend to buy it to host my personal website and maybe blog (if I get around to write one day). But now a great question arises: where do I buy it?

Do you have any advice on a cheap and nice registrar and hosting provider?

Fuck domain re-sellers who don't know what they're doing, you fucking moron you do not need DNS if the Service provider is same as domain and hosting, all you had to do was to change A record with @/${Insert IP Address here} values, it's taking you ages to do that, fucking idiots.

I will probably ask to transfer the domain name to my account if that is possible.

Was watching OITNB at home when boss called sounded urgent about SSL not working on one of our subdomains. We use a paid cloud app for some of our reports which. So the subdomain is a CNAME to the providers app subdomain. Recently there was an upgrade at our hosting but it shouldn't be related.

Boss: Hey, there is an error prompt when I visit our reporting site with https
Me: That's cos we never installed any SSL cert for that subdomain.
Boss: Well it worked before and you will need to get it fixed.
Me: Wait.. It worked before? How is that possible? We've never set it up and the subdomain is a CNAME pointing to another site which we don't own. The cert will have to load from their server and we have not done any setup with them.
Boss: I'm very sure it worked before the hosting upgrades. All along our customers has been accessing with https.
Me: Okay.... That's something new because and I am pretty SURE the last I checked, the app provider doesn't allow that yet.
* meanwhile I when to search the app provider docs and it says not able to support multiple SSL yet for CNAME
Me: Look, it says so here in the docs.
Boss: Ok, can you try to fix it as its important for the users to not see that error. It has been working all along.
Me: Hmmmm... I'll get back to you.

How do I fix something that didn't exist / broken?? How did it work before??

I know it can be possible to install the cert on the cloud provider end but we haven't done this before. And their support docs says feature not available yet.

Was it magic?? Am I missing something?? Anyway, I've sent an email to the provider's support team and telling them "it worked before"

Can anyone recommend cheap Windows-based hosting, ideally to run a couple of Umbraco instances for personal projects? I'm currently looking at the Cloud One Tier of asphostportal.com which has some good reviews, but if anyone knows of a better/cheaper hosting provider that'd be super helpful 😁

I'm trying to improve my email setup once again and need your advice. My idea is as follows:
- 2-5 users
- 1 (sub)domain per user with a catchall
- users need to be able to also send from <any>@<subdomain>.<domain>
- costs up to 1€ per user (without domain)
- provider & server not hosted in five eyes and reasonably privacy friendly
- supports standard protocols (IMAP, SMTP)
- reliable
- does not depend on me to manage it daily/weekly
- Billing/Payment for all accounts/domains at once would be nice-to-have, but not necessary

I registered a domain with wint.global the other day and I actually managed to get this to work, but unfortunately their hosting has been very underwhelming.. the server was unreachable for a few minutes yesterday not only once, but roughly once an hour, and I'd really rather be able to actually receive (and retrieve) my mail. Also their Plesk is quite slow. To be fair for their price it's more like I pay for the domain and get the hosting for free, but I digress..

I am also considering self hosting, but realistically that means running it on a VPS and keeping at secure and patched, which I'd rather outsource to a company who can afford someone to regularly read CVEs and keep things running. I don't really want to worry about maintaining servers when I'm on holiday for example and while an unpatched game server is an acceptable risk, I'd rather keep my email server on good shape.

So in the end the question is: Which provider can fulfill my email dreams?

My research so far:
1. Tutanota doesn't offer standard protocols. I get their reasons but that also makes me depended on their service/software, which I wouldn't like. Multiple domains only on the business plans.
2.With Migadu I could easily hit their limits of incoming mails if someone signs up for too many newsletters and I can't (and don't want to) micromanage that.
3. Strato: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains. Also I don't like the company for multiple reasons. However I can access a domains hosted there and could try...
4. united-domains: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains.
5. posteo: No custom domains allowed.

I'm getting tired.. *sigh*

Why do some hosting services with MySQL not allow triggers and stored procedures / functions?
Had never tried to use them and now I've done it and deployed a site, I discover I can't create triggers, and that some hosting provider don't allow users to do them... this is a rant but more of a question, as I didn't know and maybe there's lore to it you do know...

Has anyone had any experience with OVH? Are they as good of a hosting provider as five year old forum posts say they are? Specifically looking at their VPS Cloud RAM

Any opinion about cheap hosting? Im currenty at transip for dns but i want a small server with open port config or docker suport

Have a question about email service providers. Specifically inbox delivery and warmup. Over the years I gathered a ~200k email database of players from my projects. I cleared them by using debounce.io and now I have 100k clean emails. That means I can send a mass newsletter and bounce rate should be good. Now my main question is what email services provider should I use? For email client I thought of setting up sendy.co, for hosting it use sendybay.com and for smtp use pepipost.com But the problem with sendy is that it sends emails without any delay. Like 2-3 emails a second. Is there a difference in terms of inbox delivery and domain reputation wether I send all emails in bulk with sendy or should I try to keep low profile and send lets say 1k a day? I have friends who use amazon ses and they are able to send even 100k a day, given that emails database is cleared(valid working emails) and bounce rate is low.

My DNS provider does not have an API. They do have one... That is wrong... But on the description page, they say we have to open a ticket to be given access. No requirements. Nothing...

And then I am told "they do no longer offer dns for private hosting". I don't even host with them, I only have a domain with them.

But the magical word is no longer. That means they did offer it. In the description of the API it still says "and for everyone who feels comfortable interacting with a REST API." Oh, and they asked anyone who works on it to be so nice and share any SDK's they might have coded up. Would have shared my SDK. Would have... If no Rust SDK was available yet.

So, what the fuck...
The problem with that is that I need a wildcard certificate for my homelab with DNS validation. So, I need to dynamically set a txt record. Now I wonder... Was this done on purpose? They are selling wild card certificates. Letsencrypt are giving them out for free. I bet they deactivated it, so they can sell more...

Anyway. Solution time.
Short term: I make my own API with black jack and hookers... And selenium.
Long term: I need to fucking move my domains to a different provider.

But what the fuck... What the fuck?

Hey guys )
Hope all of you are having a great time )
I've been away for a while tryin to "finish" my personal website and now I think it's more or less "finished".
What cheap hosting provider would you recommend or use?
I would like to get my webite live as soon as possible.

partially tech

Is it just me or every single time* I call to some support after first 30 minutes I really want to ask question "can I talk with someone competent?". And no disrespect to these guys, many people call in with simple stuff, but damn, I try to solve stuff on my own and call in only when I need someone who actually can get somewhat technical and have some knowledge about the product/service/smh. Infuriating.

* one hosting provider proven to be exception.

Anyone using skysilk vps here? Is it reliable? What are your thoughts?

The website design looks sketchy, feels like a fake hosting provider.

Does anyone from here working by GMX? I am specially looking for a sysadmin.

The story is the following. We can't send emails to GMX addresses in general. I've contacted my provider, and they said, that they've contacted GMX several times but no solution has been made so far. This was almost a month ago and the problem still persists.

If anyone from here willing to help me clear this mess, or just give some explanation, I would be grateful. We are loosing reputation as a company having to answer from a different email address.

If it is a sensitive info please give me a channel where we can speak about the details.

Please note I am not a sysadmin by the hosting company, i am simply a customer of theirs.

Hello everyone,
I wanted to ask for advice about hosting providers. Specifically looking for vps servers.
I'm currently using OVH, but I got some recommendations that would give me a lot more for the price.
The recommendations I got were Contabo, Hetzner and Netcup
Maybe some of you have experience with those Providers and can recommend one, or maybe even some not on that list.
Thanks for taking your time to read

Does anyone have experience with contabo for vps? Would you recommend them?

Netcup Review !?
Anyone who has experience with this hosting provider ?
I’m interested for root server.

Is there any Free WordPress Hosting Providers in US?