Results tagged “Dataflame” from The Word is Not Enough

The observant among you may have noticed that I've changed web host. Goodbye Dataflame, hello LivingDot. Dataflame finally pushed me over the edge by locking down the permissions on my cgi-bin for a week while I was on holiday (without telling me) then locking them down again for two days while they did testing, simply because I was running Movable Type for this blog (and my other blogs).

LivingDot has the virtue of being a preferred partner of Six Apart, the company that makes Movable Type, and while the performance on their servers isn't as good as Dataflame's, the server occasionally times out on some requests and they're a little more expensive, they have several advantages

• They let you use SSL encryption on email in a way that's compatible with Microsoft Entourage
• They let you support a huge number of domains (50 I think) on your server at no extra cost
• They actually know what Movable Type is and how to support it.
• Large numbers of MySQL databases to call your own

The only hassles I had with the move was a couple of files that somehow got left behind; and problems getting my old MySQL databases copied over (leaving some strange characters on entries that used £s, “s, …s and Greek script). Otherwise, all is good and happy again.

Got this on Christmas Eve from my host, Dataflame.

Dear Customer,

I hereby request you to upgrade all the online webapplications which are hosted with us. Please check the following is the list of online web applications provided and hosted on our shared servers. If you have any of these hosted under your webspace, please take quick measures within 24 hours tp upgrade, else there after we will be upgrading them by ourself. This is required for security measures as depreciated and outdated scripts are hack prone and hence need a upgrade asap. Thank you for cooperation.

…

So if I don't upgrade all my Dataflame-provided scripts on Christmas Day, they'll do it for me, in their best possible English.

Ho, ho, ho.

I've already told you how my slightly rubbish hosting service, Dataflame, chose to change all the permission requirements on PHP files without bothering to tell me. Now my ISP, Be, has decided to get in on the “zero communication” act.

On Friday, mid-way through the day, they suddenly decided to implement an anti-spam measure that blocked all outgoing emails (technically, they closed ports 25 and 465). Took me a while to work out what was going on, and a bit less than a day to respond to my support request but it's all sorted: if you're a Be customer and you can't send emails, set your SMTP server to smtp1.bethere.co.uk.

But why couldn't they simply have emailed me (and everyone else) and told us that we'd need to change our email settings on a particular date? Or have a transition period? I ask you...

Sometimes you can feel so naive and trusting.

I spent a happy couple of hours removing spam files from my web server last night. I hadn't realised they were spam. I hadn't been compromised myself. There was no sign they were there without a good look at the file system. But thanks to the rubbishness of my host, Dataflame, I found out about them and took them away.