EV1 Servers can bite me

In early 2003, Flippy and looked at the outrageous website hosting bills we were racking up every month, and we decided it was time to make the move up to a dedicated server.  If it’s an unfamiliar concept, most small websites are hosted on shared servers --- one computer might hold data for 5000 or more websites, depending on size.  With a dedicated server, one “owner” controls everything on the server, and there’s no sharing.  It’s like renting an apartment vs. having your own home—when you have a dedicated server, you have more fancy options and growth opportunities because you make your own decisions.  Depending on the size of a server and the amount of bandwidth each month, the average fee for a dedicated server is about $300 (monthly).  Flippy and I started with one dedicated server from EV1Servers.net (at that time, it was called Rackshack.net), and then we added a second one.  At one point we had three servers, but we scaled it back to two.  We were always good, quiet customers who rarely needed tech support, and we were never in trouble for sending out spam, hosting illegal content, etc.

As many of you know, last month both our servers were hacked.  Whomever compromised the servers used them to set up phishing schemes, and to also set them up to send out spam emails.  This type of security information is totally over my head, so I was really scrambling to find help.  EV1 refused to help me diagnose any of the problems on the server, or to recommend someone to help us fix the problem—they just kept threatening to unplug us.  I asked for advice on their message board and no one came forward.  When I couldn’t figure out how to fix what had happened, I decided to rent a third server, a “clean” one, and to move all our websites there.  I could then cancel the accounts of both other servers and have them unplugged, and that would stop the spam mailings, the phishing, etc.  I had taught myself to install firewall programs and to tweak some security settings, so I thought a brand new start would be the best idea.

I went to the order page on the EV1 site to pick out a new server and the first thing to annoy me was the price.  There were fast, powerful servers with huge harddrives for a much lower monthly rental fee than we were paying for our inferior servers.  I picked a model out and ordered it, and was promised it would be set up in about 24 hours.  Five days later, the server was still not available.  I asked for help via live chat, I sent emails, I submitted support tickets, and got no response.  The only thing EV1 managed to do was to charge our credit card for the new server (they charged us the day we ordered it).  I finally posted a note on the message boards at EV1 eight days afer my order and surprise, my server was suddenly ready.  I immediately went into my account and cancelled it—I’d already made arrangements to rent a server from a different company.  I’d told EV1 in emails that I was cancelling my order, but I guess they chose not to listen to me.  Now that I’ve moved all our sites to a new server and cancelled our two old EV1 servers, they’ve locked us out of our old account.  I’m no longer able to access things like our old billing statements, even though I didn’t ask to have my entire account cancelled, I just asked to have my servers cancelled.  This pretty much guarantees we’ll never be ordering servers from them again.

Anyway, they still owe us $143 for the server we were charged for, but which we never used.  The charges are pro-rated, so they charged us six days before the server was even online and ready to be used.  I guess I’ll go post a note on their forums to ask for our money back, as it seems the only way to get their attention.

If you want a good company from which to rent a dedicated server, I recommend VertexHost.com.  The servers are managed, and it can cost less than $300 per month.  The guys at Vertex spent literally hours and hours moving our sites from our old servers to our new server, and they fixed our security problems for free.  It’s nice to see some good customer service.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 11/13 at 10:44 PM

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  1. EV1 sucks.  I couldn’t believe they wouldn’t help, especially because they didn’t even tell us that CPanel had security flaws.

    (hey, do I have javascript turned off, because I’m having to do some math, hrumph)

    Posted by Flippy  on  11/13  at  11:22 PM

  2. I just went through a similar move.. but on a much smaller scale.  I have a shared hosting plan .. which is all that I need.. but had to change hosts.  It was not nearly the hassle that you went through, but I too am happy to be in my new home and especially happy that my blog survived the move.

    Posted by Coll  on  11/14  at  06:45 AM
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