For more years than I care to remember, most of my websites have been hosted by 1&1 Internet.

They’ve had their ups and downs but have generally been OK so long as there have been no problems (sound familiar?)

When there have been problems, they’ve been resolved. But not fast. Support used to be UK based although (because they didn’t pay high wages) not necessarily with someone whose first language was English. Now it’s somewhere in the world – I’ve no idea where but the accents don’t sound Indian so I’d guess maybe the Philippines.

Anyway…

At 02:37 on 30th April their automated system sent me an email saying there was a problem with one of my sites. Their system thought it had been hacked and that one page (out of several thousand on that site) had a problem.

The email gave me a list of several things to do – changing user names, passwords, etc.

I did that and deleted the page “just in case”.

Despite what support tried to tell me later in the day, the email did not say I had to email back to tell them I’d done what had been recommended.

Then at 09:38 I got another email that said:

*******************************************************************************
IMPORTANT: For your own security and in order to prevent further harm, we have
temporarily locked your 1&1 contract.

Right now, our security experts are investigating the attack and the nature of
the malware. We will get back to you and unlock your contract, as soon as we
received their results.

For the time being, we assume that your 1&1 webspace will be reconnected within
the next 12 to 24 hours.
*******************************************************************************

That meant that all 37 domains on that contract were suddenly unavailable.

Yikes!

I phoned them and was kept on hold – because, as I kept getting told, my call was important but they were “helping” other customers – for around 20 minutes out of the 23 minute call.

Support then told me that they couldn’t put me through to the department dealing with my problem as it didn’t open until 11am UK time.

They couldn’t tell me why a supposedly UK based company didn’t start work until nearly lunch time and that time doesn’t really fit with USA or India or Philippines or anywhere else’s working hours.

The number they gave me to call was non-geographic (0870 prefix) and they couldn’t give me a real number to call or a number to call if I was calling from outside the UK. The alternative number on SayNoTo0870 didn’t work, so I was stuck with calling a number that wasn’t in my call package.

That call lasted just over 49 minutes, most of it on hold.

When I did get through to someone, they apparently weren’t in the right department – even though I’d supposedly been given the number for the department I needed.

And they weren’t much help either.

Eventually they managed to cut me off whilst trying to transfer me to the “correct” department.

Then when I rang back the line was engaged, so obviously I wasn’t the only person affected.

At 12:25 I got another email from them:

Thank you for your message. We have now unlocked your webspace. 

After review, we confirm that your file  does not contain
any malicious code. Our Safety Scanner made a mistake in the previous scan.

Please excuse any inconvenience caused by this false alarm.

The database for the 1&1 Safety Scanner has now been corrected. Please give our
systems 24 hours time to implement and distribute the correction.

So it wasn’t even my fault that the sites had been locked down – it was an error on their part.

Not exactly friendly customer service.

In the meantime, I’d been getting support emails from people who couldn’t access products they’d bought – apologies if you were one of those affected – and I was frantically trying to move my main site (this one) so that people could access things.

I’d been thinking about changing hosts anyway and had come across some quite good reviews for Arvixe so I ordered a package there and started the process of moving this site.

Normally I’d do this in an ordered manner, not changing name servers until the move was complete.

But this wasn’t a normal situation.

Plus I didn’t have access to the backend WordPress database – 1&1 had locked all those in the control panel – so I was using the daily backup that gets emailed to me by the WP-DB-Backup plugin I use.

Workable – just – but not fun.

Things moved across gradually.

I was still getting support emails as nameservers don’t change instantly.

I was also being logged in and out of the main admin area of the site – again due to the nameserver changes gradually happening.

The problem with nameservers is that they “propogate” around the web. It’s not an instant process because it can’t be, due to the nature of the internet.

If you’re old enough to remember medium wave (am) radio and listened to it fading in and out at night then you’ll recognise what happens.

Anyway, I managed to swap this site to Arvixe and then ran a speed test at Pingdom.

I knew from a recent offer I’d done that my site was fast on the 1&1 servers – one of the reasons I hadn’t really prioritised a hosting change.

But on Arvixe it was sluggish – down from being faster than 87% of sites on the web to around 56%.

Not good enough.

In hindsight, I suppose the fact that they pay $70 to affiliates should have given me the warning sign.

So I swapped the nameservers back to 1&1 and started looking for another host.

A techie friend has always recommended Vidahost and I’ve also used it with good results for sites I’ve installed for other people.

They used to have an affiliate program but that seems to have stopped (or at least I can’t get into it in Firefox).

I did a quick check for a coupon code and found this page on their site which said to use the coupon code JUSTASK to get a 20% discount.

Useful.

I chose their cloud hosting package – in theory, this should always be up as it spreads the load across various servers. I’ll put in some monitoring on one of my sites to check.

Now it’s just a matter of migrating the domains across.

I could use their free migration service but sites like this one are updated too often to make that a viable option and I’m probably too much of a control freak in that respect so I’ll do most if not all the migrations myself.

At least this time I’m not under quite as much time pressure.

Once I get comfortable with the process it should be easy – I’ve just moved a smaller site in a few minutes using the WP Clone plugin and apart from some nasty techie stuff in the PHP MyAdmin part of the control panel it went OK.

But if I was more normal I’d definitely take them up on the free migration!

The Vidahost cloud server control panel is their own, so that will take a bit of getting used to. But it’s not as non-standard as the 1&1 control panel and the help is OK.

Their tech support is good and when I’ve had occasion to use it for other sites I look after they’ve been quick to respond and helpful with their responses.

The only thing I’m getting used to with the cloud hosting is that each domain is treated separately.

I’m used to shared hosting where everything is in a public_html folder (or similar) and can be accessed with one set of FTP details.

With the cloud hosting, each domain has its own FTP details and if there is a master access option I’ve yet to find it.

But that’s not a major issue – I only FTP into a handful of my sites, most of the time I just use WordPress to handle any content or uploads.

So, fingers crossed, in a few days I should be on a new host for all my sites and everything should be running smoothly!