As a web developer, one is bound to come up with bad web hosts. CIHost.com is a web provider that hosts over 48,000 domains, which approximates it’s yearly revenue to roughly $20 million a year. Corporate clients include McDonalds, some GTE sites, as well as a few others. On Wednesday, December 29, 1999, the entire network of CIHost went down. Customers’ websites, email servers, and ftp’s were completely down, and CIHost left their phones off the hook, emails bounced, and faxes went unresponded. CIHost left their customers in the dark.

Prior to this outage, my website that I was developing marketpuncherz.com was hosted on CIHost. I took their $27 a month deal which gave you 500 Mb of webspace, so called “unlimited” bandwidth, mSQL, Perl, PHP, PGP, Cold Fusion, XML, 5 pop emails, a secure server, and 24/7 tech support. Sounds good right? But what I later found out is that to keep costs low, this company cut a lot of corners…

Now when I was registering my domain name with InterNIC, it should’ve rang bells in my head when I inputted the domain name server ip addresses. Both of them are on the same subnet, meaning that it’s purely redundant. The purpose of having a backup domain name server is to prevent isolation in case a whole subnet goes down. By putting the DNS on 2 different netoworks, you only regionalize outages if any. (I also noticed that my school’s DNS are also on the same subnet which explains why when there’s downtimes, that it kills the entire network) However, the euphoria of putting up my own domain must have skipped my mind on issues like this, and it didn’t hit me until someone on slashdot.org pointed it out during the CIHost outage.

After a few months after I was up, I noticed a few things that should’ve signaled me to leave CIHost. I was trying to install some new pop emails and add a chat room to my website (something that I dish more money out). It took me 3 hours to get a friggin person on the phone for them just to TAKE my damn money… On top of that, I was forwarded to another person which took another hour of wait time. I didn’t really care since I just put them on speakerphone at work, but when I got the call logs back, I realized how long this was. I didn’t leave because I figured I could solve most problems through the UNIX shell.

After I got the chat room running, I fooled with the interface and things to make it more attractive and professional. Well, turns out this sucker drives bandwidth through the roof. In one month, I had generated 21 gigs of traffic. Anyhow, one day, lo-and-behold, my entire site is locked down, and taken down. I was like, WTF???!!! Again I called them (which took a good 2 hours of wait time), and they said I had generated too much traffic. I told them that they were mistaken, and I was on their monthly special of unlimited bandwidth. The guy reponded by saying there’s no such thing, and that unless I paid the overages, that my site will be killed.

At this point, I was pissed off… I then took screenshots and emailed the tech support so show how full of shit they were. I got a call later, and I explained the situation and how furious I was. They explained that the monthly special is “unlimited bandwidth,” in the sense that you can have as much as you want over the 12 Gigs cap limit, where it’d be $20 per Gig over the cap. Then I asked why the hell did they shut down my site without warning, and just send me a bill? I’m at least entitled to a warning, and if I had gotten one, I would’ve killed the chat server. They said they sent one, and I told them to prove it and send me the logs and then I’d pay the damn cost (even though they falsely advertised)… They’d said they get back to me… They never did… Again I called (waited the damn 2 hours again), and they said that the message is automatically generated and sent and that therefore they don’t need proof… This is total bullshit.

So I decided to the hell with CIHost, and tried to pull the plug on my site. Basically, CIHost held my website hostage by demanding that I pay the overages or else they won’t release my domain. The bastards!! I also noticed that if I didn’t have a local copy (thank God), there’d be no way to archive my site to my computer, and I’d have to pay them to get my site back. Lesson people… Always keep your own backups…

I contacted my lawyer, who told me that this is a case of false advertising (the “unlimited bandwidth”) and false entrapment. I called CIHost to tell them my legal rights and what they did wrong, but they said pay up the overages, and that’s the only solution. Next thing I know, the entire site is taken offline. At this point I was fuming… I wanted to sue, but for less than 500 bucks? Not worth it. I figured, I’d just pay the damn overages, and leave it at that. So I paid, and wound up staying there since I paid the damn fee.

Now it’s fully down, for the last 7 days, with a brief spotty uptime (with major lag) during Y2K rollover weekend. As of this writing, the network is down once again, and I’m totally fed up. After calling them, the phone is left off the hook. Emailing them isn’t successful either… It gets bounced, with “no DNS entry”. Their website support, cisupport.com, is also down. I faxed them 3 times and they’ve still haven’t responded…

I already signed up with simplenet, and now have to just release my domain with CIHost, if they’d just answer their fucking phones, instead of leaving it off the hook…

It’s about time CIHost gets what’s coming to them… A class action lawsuit for gross negligence, false advertising, and consequential damages. If you have the attitude that the company is always right, and the customer is always wrong, you should rot in hell… CIHost reminds me of the insurance comany in The Rainmaker, deny all claims and first, and bank on the fact that they’ll go away.

Aside from that, I hear that (according to the posts on slashdot) the President of CIHost issued cease-and-desist orders on websites that say negative things about CIHost… Talk about having an Oedipus complex bigger than Bill Gates…

A good businessman is an ethical one… Even though some people say that’s impossible, I believe that it should be an absolute requirement.