7 Most Disastrous Web Hosting Mistakes Ever!
Most of us take our web hosting service for granted—it is certainly easy to do when the service is reliable. Sometimes, though, even services we take for granted go down or make mistakes. This is a countdown of the top seven mistakes (in our opinion) that Web Hosts have made in the last few years. Check it out!
7) DreamHost Overbills Clients by 7.5 Millions Dollars
In 2008 the very popular web hosting company, Dreamhost, accidentally overbilled all of its customers for an extra year of service. The accident was caused by the company accidentally typing in the wrong year when it double checked its billing cycles after having switched to some new servers. Instead of simply checking the billing, the system went ahead and billed the customers for a year of service.
The company apologized for the error via a blog featuring Homer Simpson and many customers were greatly offended by the apology's "aw shucks" tone and jumped ship. This lead many to complain in a very public way via blogs, review websites and popular socail netowrking websites like Digg.
6) CEO of Homestead.com Thinks It's OK to Fire The Customer
How many people have thought about firing their customers? Yes, us neither but in 2006, Justin Kitch the founder and CEO of Homestead.com posted a blog entry that advocating the "firing" of customers who proved to be more trouble than they would end up being worth. While the sentiment is nice, it probably wasn't the best idea to publish a post about very annoying customers and clients on a blog that some of those customers and clients would end up reading!
5) Google's Blogger & Blogspot Experienced Major Outages
A few years ago, as Blogger was being acquired by Google, their servers went down, making it impossible for many bloggers to access their own blogs and made it appear to readers as if those sites had simply disappeared. The outage lasted for quite a while and anyone who blogs knows that even going down for an hour can spell the difference between success and failure for a blog! The worst part was that there was no way for bloggers to contact either company to find out exactly what was happening or when, if ever, their blogs would be back online.
4) Some Valueweb Clients Had 36+ Hours of Downtime
In 2007, Valueweb (also known as Hostweb) sent out an e-mail to its customers notifying them that they would be physically changing servers and to expect about half a day of outages. Customers were without Valueweb service for more than three days. During that time, Valueweb failed to answer its customer service lines or respond to e-mails requesting updates. The service failed to keep it's customers informed and many of them bailed on the company, thinking they had lost everything in the move.
3) Turkish Hacker Successfully Hacked 38,000+ Websites
On May 18, 2006 the Turkish site cracker/hacker iSKORPiTX (considered one of the worst hackers/crackers in history) managed to hack over 38,000 websites in a single day. The list of sites hacked included governmental websites of his own country. Many web experts were flummoxed at exactly how this hacker managed to hack so many sites so quickly, defacing sub-pages within the sites and leaving a note announcing the hack, though it became clear that he was able to manipulate a Microsoft vulnerability for most of them.
2) Dreamhost Had 3,500 FTP Passwords Compromise
In June of 2007 Dreamhost accidentally leaked 3,500 FTP passwords via a third party intrusion. The intruder promptly spammed and hacked into most of the sites leaving all sorts of unwanted content. As if that weren't bad enough, when customers first complained about their sites getting hacked, the company insisted that the vulnerability was the fault of the customers!
It wasn't until later that they admitted the fault was on their end. Even though it took a while for them to admit their mistake it's good to see that they did own up to it.
1) Yahoo's 12-Hour Outage Cyber Monday 2007
On Cyber Monday in 2007, Yahoo experienced a lengthy outage that crippled many of its small business customers and left them unable to accept orders. If you run an ecommerce website you can only imagine that there is not a worse day for this to happen.
This caused these small businesses to lose quite a bit of money on lost sales opportunities. With Cyber Monday easily being the busiest online shopping day of the year you can see how this made number one on our list. Yahoo apologized for the outage, but offered customers no form of restitution (like a sales credit toward hosting fees) to make up for lost profits.
There have been other mistakes, of course—no web host is one hundred percent perfect—but these mistakes, we think you'll agree, are pretty bad!
