An Educational Web Hosting Horror Story

By Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
Article Date: 2010-06-22

Every CTO worth his (or her) salt considers a number of factors when picking a company to handle business domain names and email, including price, reliability, and ease of setup. Only one man's tale has made clear that CTOs should also consider how a hosting provider will respond to hacking, since this can put everything at risk.

Brent Stinski, the founder and CEO of Media Predict, didn't really require much help to get his site back to normal after a hacker altered a portion of it. His problem with Yahoo Small Business surfaced days afterward, when Yahoo responded in dramatic fashion.

Stinski wrote, "Citing our presence of a list of 'abusive sites,' Yahoo yanked my entire domain, taking down every aspect of my site. Yahoo then yanked my business and personal e-mail addresses as well. I received no notice or instructions as to what to do. Heck - it took me a half-hour to figure out that the problem was just with me, and not Yahoo Small Business generally."

Then followed the sort of seek-a-response-in-minutes-and-get-a-useless-one-in-days situation that is so common in customer service horror stories. Despite the fact(s) that Stinski was a longtime Yahoo Small Business client and his company has received positive mentions from both the New York Times and the New Yorker.

He later continued, "At last I received a form letter stating that Yahoo would release my domain, but 'for legal reasons it will not be possible to reactivate your Yahoo! account.' Thus apparently I will never get access again to personal or business e-mails still stored in the cloud."

So again, be sure to take this sort of scenario into account when picking a hosting provider. Consider checking over your security provisions once more for good measure, too.

About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.