Hackers nail unsecure websites on Afrihost server

[OCP]

I am sorry to say this, but Afrihost does not have a good track record when it comes to mail or hosting. In 2012 for example Afrihost used SpamExperts.com to identify spam and then applied a spam-filter which only did a partial match of the DKIM header (for whatever reason they decided not to match the full 240 bytes public key DKIM header but only the first 16 bytes and the last 6 bytes) - as you can imagine, only matching a portion of a public key resulted in a number of legitimate senders (we were unfortunately one of those) being blocked and marked as a "botnet" (@Afrigenie - this was ticket ASH-990-5796 from June 2012 and Bruce VR/your support team was incapable of helping there).

I would have a lot more consideration for such mistakes if I did not have dozens of similar mistakes (such as the time when your network staff introduced a switching loop into the DiData network causing a broadcast storm and then blamed IS for their poor infrastructure). Mistakes can happen, but to me it appears that lack of knowledge and attention to detail or following basic operational principles when running a hosting environment are to blame for most of the issues.

Disappointingly none of those issues are followed with transparent disclosure and are always buried to avoid getting bad press.

This gives much needed depth to the exact reasons why I moved all my hosting away from AH over a year ago
Why anyone would still want to be dealing with a deceptive company like this is beyond me.

 

[Geoff.D]

........ In either case, security is not compromised, it's a case of users not following best practice

But the "user" out there is NOT an IT fundi, he does not even know what "best practice" is. He relies on his service provider to do the important things and most probably (incorrectly it seems) make up for his lack of knowledge or alert him when things need to be improved in his website design.

 

[Geoff.D]

This gives much needed depth to the exact reasons why I moved all my hosting away from AH over a year ago
Why anyone would still want to be dealing with a deceptive company like this is beyond me.

The question is did you move to a hosting service that was better? If so how do you know it is better and more secure?

 

[MagicDude4Eva]

The question is did you move to a hosting service that was better? If so how do you know it is better and more secure?

Although we never hosted with AH, from a business-site we run all our blogs on WPEngine who is really good at what they do (especially when it comes to multi-site installations, updates and security). My own hosts I run via Siteground - the support is excellent and immediate and their skillset is superb. Prior to that I used AWS / Rackspace. If I did not have my own Docker-servers, I would use the convenience of DigitalOcean and their droplets. I am still surprised that so many people use their ISP for email. Google Apps is the way to go.