UK Poet, Philosopher & Artist Ivor Griffiths' Official Website

Posts from December, 2007

Back at last

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

I made the mistake of hosting with Dotster. Their servers got hacked by phishers and they couldn’t get it working again. Had to call in outside help. After three weeks offline the best they could do was tarball up my sites and databases. Even this was done reluctantly as they did not want to admit the hack.

To make matters worse UKReg and Fasthosts have been effectively shut down by hackers. 100,000 UK websites offline since Thursday 29th November. They reset all the passwords without telling anyone. This meant everything failed: Sites, email, DNS, Databases, control panel – the lot. I can’t get on even now to change DNS and make glue records.  I rang the premium rate number and there were 51 people ahead of me in the queue.

The thing that is worrying is that Fashosts called in the Police to try and resolve it and they still got shutdown. Of course being hacked may not be their fault, but reseting passwords and posting them out (I still haven’t got mine) is sheer idiocy. Of course some would say this was just an excuse, delaying tactics even, or a ruse to generate premium rate ‘phone numbers.

Either way as soon as I get back in I will be transferring everything out.