The best way to express your dissatisfaction with a service provider, in my opinion, is to take your money elsewhere. I have not yet cancelled my ZZ Hosting account (it only costs me $8.50 a month). I’m willing to go one more month to see if they can fix their problem.

But that’s necessarily good advice for everyone. We each need to make our own decisions. If you feel like you cannot afford to be patient, don’t be. Just find a new hosting provider.

My domain– where I’d kept a wordpress blog for FOUR years (thousands of posts)– went down at about the same time as yours, and I kept landing on that cpanel/apache page that I assume others got.

I wrote them asking them what was up, and I got an email back explaining that a RAID array went down and they were working with Dell to fix the problem (within 48 hours– HA!).

Well, a week after that, lo and behold ELEVEN files appeared, listed in the new index page. They were weird, random files from like 2005– a random picture of my friend, a random html file from a previous website, an empty folder, WEIRD stuff.

However, one of those files was this weird file named info.txt, that I had never seen before– I opened it up, and all the file contains is a list that contains
1) some domain I’ve never seen before– something like chris.WorldWideReads.com
2) a user name this is my common username for things (not chrisc)
3) (this is the big one) A PASSWORD that I commonly use for log ins.

So anyone visiting my site could click on this file (that i’ve never seen and that I didnt’ put there) and see my most common login name and password!

I can’t log in to delete the file (and have since had to go and change any service where I might have used that password, there are certainly dozens of others that I’ve forgotten about).

Anyway, so I wrote zzhosting AGAIN, this time telling them about the mysterious info.txt file and asking them to delete it immediately for me.

About 2 days later, I finally get a response– a form email explaining that they’re making progress and all my files should be up in 48 hours… they hadn’t even read the bigger complaint: that they’re giving away my username and password.

I wrote them again, with the subject “PLEASE ACTUALLY READ THIS– YOU’RE GIVING AWAY MY PASSWORD” and explained again the problem with this weird info.txt file.

I got a reply 24 hours later that said “We’ll remove the file and advise when it is completed”. That was about 4 days ago.

Today, I went to my domain– the file was still there– and in my inbox was a new email from support at zzhosting. The new email says that since they haven’t heard back from me, they’re assuming the problem is fixed and they’re closing the support ticket.

GACKASDFKAJSh!

I’m so angry right now– not only am I pretty sure that I’ve lost four years worth of blogging and comments– but as of now there’s still a little file on my domain giving away my username and password. I’ve been promised that both the domain would be restored and that they’d delete one little file for me and they have done NOTHING about either of these issues.

Someone mentioned something about suing these guys earlier. Anyone know if there’s grounds to sue over this? Could a class-action suit work? I don’t know much about legal stuff, but I’d say that their guarantee of 99.9% uptime was not fulfilled and because of that, I’ve lost hundreds of hours worth of work. Also, I was not hired for a job when they couldn’t get to my online resume and portfolio that was hosted at zzhosting. Those are starting to sound like real monetary losses to me.

–Chris

The one remaining domain is online. They brought it back about 36 hours ago, give or take.

I’m sure their tech staff is working hard, but this issue is really immense and I just feel they need to be more open with the customers about whatever happened.

The only thing I’ve received in reply to my help tickets is this cryptic message: “We need to file-check against every account manually before restoring it. This is the reason for the delay. It will be completed within 5-6 hours. I hope you understand the hard-time.”

That 5-6 hours was up days ago, and still nothing. Today I gave up and began the process of moving the affected sites over to HostGator. This is a shame because I have been quite happy with ZZ Hosting, having used them for four years now with only minor problems, and they’ve always responded almost instantly to any support requests.

I’m wondering if they’re going belly-up…?

Michael: Your curiosity is understandable. However, the sites I host with these services are personal sites that I have never discussed publicly. For my larger brand sites, like Xenite.Org and SF-Fandom, I use dedicated server hosting — but I can share plenty of painful horror stories about all levels of dedicated hosting.

I feel it’s good to know how all levels of the market work as much as possible. Many people start out their Web experience with small hosting accounts like those you can get from ZZ Hosting and Bluehost.

As far as I know, ZZ Hosting has always had a good reputation and I’ve used them for at least two years without any real issues.

But the way they are handling the current situation is not satisfactory to me.

Thanks for sharing your experience.