I strongly urge anyone that reads this to avoid using the hosting service at http://www.fuitadnet.com at all costs. In the past, they have proved unreliable but the recent debacle has convinced me that it’s finally worth finding a new hosting provider. As such, I can only rely on this blog at the moment.
I signed up for Fuitadnet years ago when I was a lot bigger into the internet. They had an ad banner on the Something Awful forums (which I lurked frequently at the time) and the deal seemed worth it: for about 5 bucks I got more bandwidth than I’d ever use and disk space to match. There was no real problems with it for as long as I remember, every now and then the servers would be down but for what I was paying and how low-traffic my site was I didn’t see any reason to get upset.
About a year ago we were notified via the forums and I believe emails that there would be a price increase (the post). It was only about $2 per month for me and $7/month was still pretty trivial so I didn’t care. I looked over the explanation for the increase and was particularly pleased with the nightly backup, since it meant I wouldn’t have to worry about backing up the databases for the PHP toy projects I had.
The only real things that had me upset with them were that in order to use any apps they had I had to set folders to world-writable on the server. I may be wrong but I was under the impression that there was no good reason to do this, and that PHP should be running in a process that could be given access to the directories. I posted about this in the forums and was told I was probably on an older server and should file a move request via support. I did this, and the support engineer assured me everything was taken care of. In fact, all he did was set the directories to world-writable.
The next big problem I had was an instance where a script kiddie got loose on my server and defaced my site, along with others. I seem to remember it took a week or so before Fuitadnet made a response explaining what had happened. This was after they restored an old backup without warning. Apparently someone had an insecure script that allowed entry, that was the excuse they gave. This kind of agitated me because it took a few days of people filing support tickets and asking about it on the forums to get an explanation.
This month has been the final straw. Some time at the end of July several sites went completely down, and when they came back all data was gone. The first mention of it is on the forums on the 28th (the post). I filed a support ticket and got basically the response that Fuitadnet managed to post on the 31st. A disk array failure had wiped out the data; such things are rare in a well-maintained RAID array but not unheard of. The mystery of it all is that it is now almost a full month since the disk array failure and several customers are curious where their daily backup is. Some people seem to have received restores from October, but that’s really odd since we’re all paying higher rates for daily backups. I made a post pointing out that faster revelation of severe problems and better damage control could keep people more happy, which was met with a response from the Fuitadnet president that:
- The forums are apparently low priority and will not be used for timely reports of service outages.
- The staff is working hard to restore everyone to a normal state as quickly as possible.
- I should ignore the forums, support system, and live phone support (part of the reason for increased rates) and use the IRC chat for proof that they are dedicated to restoring normalcy.
I’ve filed a support ticket expressing an interest in a restore along with a trial of posts in their support forums expressing this interest. I’ve had no response. I am lazy and I don’t want to switch hosts, but it appears that Fuitadnet is content to just let their customers deal with problems and can’t deliver on their promises.
