[kimmer13]

Last Friday morning, the websites (all) hosted on our webhosting company's servers were all hacked into - Sarbot511 - all index pages were rewritten with his page, access to cpanel and webmail was lost. We were told by the webhost company (via a post on their announcement board) to reload any page in our directories with the word 'index' in their names and all would be well. It was an 'amateur' attempt to hack our sites. They further said numerous servers - not just theirs - were affected by this Sarbot511.

We uploaded copies of our entire website, and our website was back up by 1pm that day. However, it is now Day 6-1/2... we just got our cpanel back yesterday. We still do not have webmail access thru the server, our travelling staff are using mail2web instead.

Am I being unreasonable thinking this is unacceptable? Whenever I try to create a new tech support ticket about the issue, I am told they are still restoring websites, and that must take priority over re-enabling webmail for us, when we can get to the mail other ways.

Opinions?

[colinsp]

Sounds like their security was lacking in that it allowed cpanel to be hacked. It also sounds like they have a handful of support staff and a lot of hosted domains / servers, which is typical of a lot of the shared hosting companies. I think they are right in their rebuild / reconfig priorities BUT that doesn't help you.

If you jump to another shared host you may just be jumping from the frying pan into the fire or you may decide that you can afford to go for dedicated hosting and support as the websites are so important to your company, which is probably the best way to get the level of support and uptime that you require.

[kimmer13]

Well, I understand this is something that can happen, but what I find most disturbing is that one week after the attack they have not totally restored 100% functionality to their servers. I would have expected that within 48 hours, max, every site hosted by them should have been restored from backups.

Plus, this whole event really pointed out something that we never noticed before - there is no phone number to call them, and no email. Everything is done via 'support tickets' and 'announcement' pages on their web site.

We are definitely moving, and hope to find affordable dedicated hosting services. But before doing so, I really just wanted to know if my expectations are too high...

[briealeida]

Six and half days to recover from a security breach is a very long time. Agreed, jumping to another shared host could be from the frying pan into the fire but if you make the decision without haste, with lots of investigation, research, reading reviews, speaking with the company, it will become clear who to avoid and who not to avoid.

Keep in mind that this could happen with dedicated hosting; that's not always a golden ticket.

I suggest you take a look at some hosting reviews and see what real customers have to say and also gather questions about things that are important to you and speak with the sales and technical support departments of companies you are interested in.

[Eriksrocks]

Get a new host.