NEVER Use Easyhosty.co.uk

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Posted by Whitewolf2, 02-28-2013, 11:10 PM
Hi all, Thank you for taking the time to read this. We would like to spread the message about an appalling web host - EasyHosty. Our dealing with them has been nothing but an uphill battle. From our experience it seems that they are quite the 1 man band. Unprofessional service, support from what seems like an 18 year old with an attitude problem and packages that just never work. We signed up with EasyHosty mostly because the packages seemed relatively inexpensive and value for money. We made the mistake of opting to pay annually (A mistake that will later cost us the entire subscription cost as EasyHosty refuses to refund). Throughout our dealings with EasyHosty we had the following problems that I feel should be highlighted. 1. Zero History ALL tickets are deleted! And I mean every single ticket you ever create with EasyHosty will be deleted after 24 hours. So much for historic resolutions? Or the ability to view previous solutions? Oh no, EasyHosty wants to wipe the slate clean, every 24 hours, just so that no one can truly see how terrible they are at what they do. 2. Magical Firewall Easyhosty seem to employ a "hamster on a wheel" in order to maintain security and order on their servers. This "hamster" decides to block IP addresses on a whim. We had HUGE problems with some of our customers complaining that their clients could not access the web page (Nor could they), on investigation it was found that they had in fact been blocked by the firewall. Unfortunately we had ZERO access to the IP table and thus could not see who was blocked, the only thing we could do was advise them to wait the block out. When this started to happen across the board for both us (Yes that is right, we were blocked from our OWN SITE!), this started to get business critical and so we got in touch with the infamous EasyHosty support. I am not going to say much about the response from their support team, because I think the log speaks for itself. Please see attachments for ticket log (This is just a small example of the professionalism that EasyHosty prides itself on). Remember in point 1 I said that they deleted ALL tickets? This is probably why, they don't want their shameless attempts at 'support' to remain on the clients account. 3. Maze of websites The EasyHosty site has to be one of the toughest to navigate. We've seen some pretty shocking sites in our day, but once we got into the members area of EasyHosty we were instantly lost. Each link practically leads to a dead end. Here is an example, in our welcome email we received more than 3 URL's to access our control panel: https://easyhosty.co.uk/sign-in.html http://manage.easyhosty.co.uk/customer http://manage.easyhosty.co.uk/reseller None of the above links go to the same system, all different. We only ever managed to log in by attempting to navigate the overcrowded and useless knowledgebase. ---- Well that is our experience, take from it what you may and I'd actually encourage a response from EasyHosty. I'd also like to make it known that we did request a refund from them, which was promptly and abruptly denied. We will post this on every public forum relating to Reseller / Web hosting that we can find. Please feel free to copy this post to wherever you like, the faster and wider we can spread the word about this terrible company the better. Directly uploaded images available here (Apologies for the way its structured, the PDF just printed it that way!): 1. http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/2713/questionanswer1.jpg 2. http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/2084/questionanswer2.jpg 3. http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/735...ionanswer3.jpg 4. http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/7467/questionanswer4.jpg 5. http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/916...ionanswer5.jpg 6. http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/3876/questionanswer6.jpg Attached Thumbnails
Posted by net, 02-28-2013, 11:39 PM
Seems you just registered to bring out your frustration with this host. If you are a reseller, you can't have access to firewall. Only root. It seems your problem is with CT_Limit and this can be adjusted. If they can't do it, then better move somewhere or get a VPS so you have control with the firewall.
Posted by NetworkPanda, 03-01-2013, 12:04 AM
I don't see anything wrong with this hosting service. It was a right move by them to block these connections. This is what CSF does on all servers. 300 and 509 simultaneous connections by a single computer to the server? No normal visitor would ever have 500 simultaneous established connections to the server. Normal visitors or site admins never have more than 20-25 simultaneous connections established. The average for an actively browsing visitor is 5-10 connections. In rare cases the number could reach 40-50 only for a few seconds. But 300-500? This was a DoS attack, so well done by CSF to block them. Also if some people were blocked by CSF because of many failed cPanel login attempts, it was their mistake. It looked like a brute force attack to the server and the host and CSF are doing their job, blocking them. Every hosting company has a firewall installed which blocks attacks by people opening hundreds of connections to the server or multiple failed cPanel login attempts. So, again I don't see what's wrong. Last edited by NetworkPanda; 03-01-2013 at 12:07 AM.
Posted by Whitewolf2, 03-01-2013, 09:10 AM
Hi Net, thanks for the reply! Its not so much that we registered just to air our grievances with this host, we'd like to contribute to the community as a whole as well . We understand that issue with access to the firewall, but we had customers that were unable to access their site for days on end and we had no way of being able to resolve it. The CT_Limit configuration could have been a problem, but from the replies of EasyHosty, you can see that they were not willing to even acknowledge there was a problem. Needless to say we have subsequently moved to a much better host! Hi NetworkPanda, Under no circumstances was the firewall operating correctly. Blocking even US out on many occasions and we certainly were not conducting a DoS attack. The firewall was grossly misconfigured and EasyHosty refused to look into the problem and even advised that all future replies will be IGNORED. Where does that leave the customer? It leaves them in dismay mostly because they cannot resolve their clients issue. We have a number of Ecom's hosted with us and when this issue started to occur with them, it was almost a blind panic because legitimate users of the site (Customers who would purchase goods) were unable to access the site. They even had a number of emails asking why the site was offline from repeat customers. So it was a business critical issue that EasyHosty flat out ignored. This is not the type of service one expects in a partner and certainly not one worth defending.
Posted by Server Management, 03-01-2013, 09:42 AM
You can be listed in a firewall for anything not just attacks you know...
Posted by Martin-D, 03-01-2013, 09:49 AM
Haven't really bothered to read the whole thing but I did notice in the screenshots that no staff names are visible. Do you ever get a personal reply from someone who is clearly identified?
Posted by Whitewolf2, 03-01-2013, 10:22 AM
Exactly our point, we were being blocked for absolutely no reason. Now being in the IT industry, we understand that these things happen but the provider has to work to find an acceptable resolution, EasyHosty would have nothing of it. Hi Martin, no staff names were ever included. The reply was always from "Customer Service", replies were always short with no greeting or salutation, nor did they bid farewell. If it wasn't a short, abrupt response we would get a generic 'copy&paste' reply, which never really resolves the problem.
Posted by Martin-D, 03-01-2013, 10:27 AM
That just makes it worse in my eyes. Setting aside the fact I can't see any legitimate reason to delete historic support tickets, if there is no name then you can't even say "Joe Bloggs helped me with this last time, he'll remember what was done"
Posted by Whitewolf2, 03-01-2013, 10:28 AM
Couldn't agree more. But to be fair, I don't think there was more than one person at EasyHosty, hence the reason for the lack of names.
Posted by Whitewolf2, 03-04-2013, 11:12 AM
Seems EasyHosty is now been bought (Who knows why): Or maybe it's just a ruse...
Posted by xlilx, 03-04-2013, 01:20 PM
Any more problem with this host?
Posted by JixHost, 03-04-2013, 07:58 PM
I would like to hear easyhostys' side on this in order to get a better understanding. Sometimes something small can escalate to be a big deal if left ignored.
Posted by Whitewolf2, 03-04-2013, 08:04 PM
Not much point at this stage. They have changed hands, so one would assume their response would be "That was the old team at EasyHosty, we plan to improve our service".
Posted by Net_Visions, 03-05-2013, 09:03 AM
Whitewolf2 is simply annoyed because a request for a refund was turned down several months after signing up and making payment. As it stated in the terms of service reseller accounts and domain names are non refundable. I see no reason why CT_Limit should be more than 300 CSF was checked and was working as was expected and was checked over twice. If an IP gets blocked there is an IP unblock feature in the client area so customers can unblock IP's which also says why the IP was blocked. EasyHosty has been taken over by another company
Posted by Whitewolf2, 03-05-2013, 09:11 AM
Hi EasyHosty, Thanks for your reply. We were rather disgruntled by the lack of refund, but have put it behind us. What we have an issue with though, is the WAY the support was delivered. Advising a client that future responses will be IGNORED is just not good business. While we appreciate that there is an IP unblock feature in the client zone, it doesn't actually help at all. How are we supposed to get the IP address of every site visitor in order to unblock them? My clients customers were coming to the site, browsing for a minute or so and then got blocked, did they hang around? No, they took their business elsewhere and thus my client lost a sale. This was a business critical issue which was occurring daily, an issue that you out right refused to address. Your CSF is firing too many false positives and you were too arrogant & stubborn to admit it, let alone resolve it. EasyHosty has been taken over by another company and I certainly hope they attempt to make an improvement on the appalling service that EasyHosty seems to provide at present.
Posted by DWS2006, 03-05-2013, 09:28 AM
If browsing a few pages on the site pushed them over 300 concurrent connections, check the coding of those pages. Possibly your clients are using code that causes an unusual number of concurrent connections per user (Poorly coded stat tracking perhaps?).
Posted by Whitewolf2, 03-05-2013, 09:33 AM
Hi DWS2006, I most definitely agree with your comments above, it could be an issue with the code or faulty tracking. However, this occurred on many of the sites (Even our site!) all of which use different tracking services(Google Analytics, Mouseflow etc). It was not an isolated incident to just one site and through a bit of research I've found we haven't been the only customer with the problem!
Posted by DWS2006, 03-05-2013, 09:50 AM
That does sound like a firewall configuration problem. Did they ever tell you what CT_INTERVAL they were using? Since the connections are calculated based on a period of time it's much easier to have unnecessary blocks if they set this too high (to lower server load).
Posted by Whitewolf2, 03-11-2013, 02:40 PM
They didn't even acknowledge the problem DWS2006, let alone investigate. So I have no idea how badly misconfigured their CSF is! In other news, I am thanking our lucky stars that we migrated, just got this email:
Posted by Server Management, 03-11-2013, 07:03 PM
If the sites are on the same server and the firewall blocks your IP then you will not see anything be served from that server because your blocked in it's firewall. CSF is virtually impossible to miss-configure anyhow...
Posted by medworthy, 03-23-2013, 11:17 PM
I am having problems parsing my message to this message board, please read the attachment. Attached Files easyhosty.pdf (34.3 KB, 39 views)
Posted by bear, 03-24-2013, 09:03 AM
What sort of problems are you having? Not sure anyone will be willing to open a PDF from a brand new member here. It may not be safe to do so.
Posted by Ash, 03-24-2013, 09:07 AM
I'm going to guess the issue was due to some links in the email exchanges on the attached. @medworthy, you require 5 posts before being able to post a link here. The file is ok, but best to try again cutting out the URLs, and you should be good
Posted by medworthy, 03-24-2013, 03:20 PM
Thanks bear and Loon, whilst I would like to post my message in whole, I appreciate the security concerns related to PDF files (the file was created using Libreoffice export feature) Instead I have attached the file as a text file (utf8) -- Hopefully that this is acceptable. Attached Files easyhost.txt (8.2 KB, 63 views)

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