Worms, Routers Raise Downtime Concerns

Karen Snider, theWHIR.com

April 1, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY

REVIEW) -- Worm attacks, router troubles and other difficulties tore a

path of downtime through the hosting community in the last week,

flooding hosting forums with hosts, resellers and customers scrambling

for information on how to get their sites back up.

Texas-based C I Host (cihost.com) drew a lot of online attention when it was hit by the Witty worm. Not sure what was happening, customers posted on forums like WebHosting Talk (webhostingtalk.com) and SitePoint (sitepoint.com) forums asking if others were being affected. Indeed, they were. Some reported outages of 36 hours, while others said they were down for almost a week.

C I Host CEO Chris Faulkner addressed the

issue by posting a note on WebHosting Talk, explaining that C I Host

was attacked March 20, but that all of its customers' data had been

saved. Faulkner said his goal was to have all shared hosting Windows

clients - with the exception of seven servers that were fully destroyed

- up and running my March 25.

"The last ‘magic 7,'" he wrote, "will be

back online before Sunday March 28, 2004 at the very latest. Those

servers were so badly damaged, all new hardware had to be pulled from

inventory and built completely from scratch with Windows OS reloaded,

IMail and every piece of software individually installed by hand and

then pulling the 120-200GB of client data from tape backup for each

server."

The attack kept C I Host staff working

around the clock. "Contingency plans were ready and we switched to our

recovery mode," Faulkner told theWHIR. "We have heard that other

hosting companies have not fared as well, so we are extremely

encouraged that we made out so well. All of this should be helpful

information for future attacks... and we all know that, unfortunately,

these attacks are one facet of the Internet."

C I Host has since upgraded security and server back-up safeguards.

Customers of other hosts, including as

EV1 Servers, Server Matrix and CrystalTech, also hit the forums last

week, desperate to find out why their sites were down.

"I am not sure if anyone else knows it

yet, but there has been a major router problem in the East Coast and

Europe. It (has) been going on for the last 10 hours or so," one user wrote on WebHosting Talk.

Forum users tried to sort out who was being affected and eventually determined that the source of the problem was AboveNet.

AboveNet spokesman Joe Ramsey confirmed

an outage on March 25, but reports that it only lasted five or ten

minutes. The outage, which happened while AboveNet was performing "a

routine equipment upgrade," compromised connectivity between the US and

Europe. AboveNet has since suspended equipment upgrades and is

reviewing its testing procedures to ensure a similar outage does not

happen again, an AboveNet spokesperson said.

While those customers, at least, were able to find out what the source of their woes were, Dot5 (dot5hosting) customers are still wondering why

their sites have not been functioning properly. "I've noticed in the

past month or so that the server (NS41) my site is hosted on has been

down occasionally for a few minutes to a couple of hours," a

webhostingtalk thread starter wrote.

Dot5 customers have been complaining on

the forums for weeks about their services. Many said that Dot5

responded to their concerns by saying it is in the process of upgrading

its servers. Confusion lingers as Dot5 customers speculate on whether

Dot5 has been purchased by iPowerWeb (ipowerweb.com),

which certainly appears to have some affiliation with Dot5. The

dot5hosting.com site includes photographs and information showing that

Dot5 is using iPowerWeb's data center.

Dot5's customer service phone numbers do

not appear to be working, and iPowerWeb has refused to confirm whether

it has purchased Dot5.

Problems with iPowerWeb came up in a more humorous light in another thread.

"I sent in a message to tech support

about my site being down for over 2 hours on the 15th of March," the

thread starter wrote. "This was the fourth time my site had been down

in 10 days for an extended period of time... Nothing was ever done and

I finally cancelled the account and switched hosts. So remember... it's

now been hosted somewhere else for almost 2 weeks." The user claims

that iPowerWeb responded with a message indicating that his site was

working and that there is no downtime.

"Of course it's working fine," the user wrote. "You aren't hosting it!"

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