Don’t Host With Servage
Regular readers know that I tell it like it is. Well, I’ve had it with Servage, one of the hosting companies I use, because of the continual security breaches on the sites I host there. One of those sites was the Google Suggest Explorer, which I just moved over to another hosting provider this morning. Every few days the site would get hacked and some script would insert links to dubious sites into various pages, eventually causing the site to be flagged by Google and others as a bad site unless I caught the offending pages in time and removed the bad stuff from them. This happens to the other sites that are still hosted there, which I plan on moving shortly as well. Moving sites is a pain in many cases because of the databases involved, but the short-term pain will be worth the long-term gain of peace of mind and better search engine rankings. There are other downsides to Servage, too, so I really can’t recommend them and in fact really regret using them. (I’ve had no such issues with ResellerZoom and others.)
If you do need to move hosting services, for whatever reason, here are some tips:
- Back everything up before switching. It should be a given, but before you switch your site over make sure you have a recent backup of everything on the site. This includes any MySQL databases you may be using. How you do this depends on the system you’re using, if your system uses cPanel for controlling the site (Servage doesn’t, by the way, which is another complaint I have) then there’s a “Backup” tool that makes things pretty simple.
- Get as much of the new site going before switching. You can create a new account on the new hosting provider to host the site and you can do a lot of preparation — such as uploading files — before actually switching the site over to the new provider. Instead of working with domain names, for example, us raw IP addresses when moving things to the new servers.
- If you’ve had security problems, don’t use the backups you made. This may seem contradictory, but in security cases it’s best to work from “fresh” data rather than potentially compromised data. Most people I know have a “local” copy of their websites that they can work with. Start from there, not from the data you’ve downloaded from your working site. WordPress users have to use the data from the site, of course, since all the posts and so on are stored in a MySQL database. But use this as an opportunity to upgrade your “new” site to the latest version of WordPress and then use WordPress’ built-in export capability to export the blog data to an XML file that you can later import into your new blog.
- Give yourself lots of time. Don’t be surprised if it takes you a few hours to move things over, especially the first time you do this kind of thing.
- Stay near your computer for a few hours. Once you switch the nameserver (DNS) entries for your site to the new provider, don’t assume you’re done. You’ll probably have more stuff to do once the new site goes “live” and you’ll want to check every nook and cranny to make sure there are no missing pages and so on.
You’ll find lots of advice online, too, don’t just listen to me. This is a common situation for webmasters. Just give yourself lots of time to do it and expect things to be screwed up for a day or two and you’ll be fine.
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AdSense, Google Suggest, hosting, hosting providers, Servage
Comments
10 Responses to “Don’t Host With Servage”
Sadly, a LOT of hosting companies suck. I’ve been worked over pretty badly by the folks at LunarPages, so I will never trust them again. They took me for hundreds of dollars in lost income on a shared hosting account for which I paid less than $200.
I have two companies that I can very strongly recommend. For sharing hosting, Ace-Host.net is the best I’ve found. It’s $14.95 a month, but their service is incredible (email responses within about 3 mins) and their servers are never oversold. I have a seasonal site that’s seeing about 12-13K uniques a day right now, and they handle it very smoothly.
For VPS, I went with LiquidWeb. I’ve been with them before, and recently went back with them. This is for my really important (but not especially high-traffic) sites. I’d be in trouble if this was down. I pay $40 a month for a reasonable-sized package there with WHM, CPanel, Fantastico and the rest. And heroic support.
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Chuck is right… LiquidWeb is a great solution for a VPS. One of my websites got slammed when I was with StartLogic and all hell broke loose. From my site then getting dropped for over a week! To horrible customer service, and everything in between. I switched over to LiquidWeb and within hours had everything set up and ready to go not to mention that they have the best customer service around! I’ll always recommend liquid web.
I just read your post, unfortunately several days ago i just renewed my subscription with servage.
Although my visitors not as much as yours but i anticipate it to received many visitors.
This is my second year with them and there will be no third year
Thank for your info.
I hate transferring hosting accounts. Always a lot of hassle and lost mails during domain ns transfer.
Re:bullet points 2/5; Almost all the hosting providers I’ve used let you view your website before the DNS has switched–e.g. http://(ip).(ip).(ip).(ip)/~(account)
If you use local links in your pages (index.php instead of http://www.website.com/index.php), you can run a broken link checker on the new site via ip/temporary url.
Coincidentally, I’m using Resellerzoom too–haven’t had any problems at all.
I’m also moving away from servage.net. Their security experts are totally incompetent, my site gets hacked about twice a year. All they do against this is to tell their customers to change their FTP passwords because of a “change in the system”, and additionally to this they add a captcha at the login page to prevent automatic hacker robots changing the user’s FTP passwords. Hackers can still manually change your FTP password though.
The customer service gives pretty silly answers (it’s a cheap call-center located in India btw., I saw that in my site logs when one of their “experts” visited my page), sometimes they just ignore half of your ticket. If you send a ticket telling them that your site is unreachable they contact you when your site is back up again telling you that they don’t see a problem.
What made me quit at servage.net is that I had to pay for the monthly costs of a period where I did not use their service. They’re telling me it’s impossible to refund the money or change the date, but they have done it for me once before already.
Can someone suggest me a good web hosting company? I need 500mb web space and 50GB traffic per month. PHP+MySQL.
Thank you for posting your warning about this company and for providing valuable suggestions on what to do when switching hosting companies.
One further point needs to be made as well as it relates to blogs.
My blog was hosted with a particular company and provided by that same company. The links to blog entries contained the hosting company’s name! When we switched to a different hosting firm, the names of the links pointing to the same blog entries changed. Unfortunately, google and other search engines still referenced the old links. Those links that were clicked upon were obviously no longer functional.
The moral of the story: Ensure that blog templates are not proprietary to a hosting company. If so, in the event that you change hosting companies, prepare that it may take several months for the search engines to drop the “dead links” and point to the correct links.
Servage is apparently run by a bunch of pimple faced juvenile thug hackers. They lie, cheat, take your money, never provide any truthful answers, never fix anything, always blame THEIR SECURITY FAILURES on their customers AND they allow daily unending hacking and security breaches with no property security at all.
Unless you are a complete fool, unless you want to be hacked every day, avoid servage. DO NOT HOST WITH SERVAGE. They are thieves liars cheaters INCOMPETENT hacker-loving scumbags.
Hi chuck, I also have bad experience with lunarpages. The almost deleted the whole of my page. including all parked domain. About liquidweb I never heard them.. Thanks for sharing.