Alex Le’s Blog

Check this out and see if you are American or not.

I woke up this morning, found out that my lastproxy site was down, and so are all of my other websites hosted on the same accounts. I was so upset and got on the phone right away to call 1and1.

The lady from 1and1 responded politely about the status of my account, saying that the “admin” had decided to move my account to a different server. I was so mad and angry at the moment, but I tried to keep my temper down. I demanded for an explanation from the 1and1 side - as I haven’t received any advanced notice or emails from them about the usage of my site. The lady put me on hold for about 40 minutes (!) and got back after talking to her supervisor and the “admin” guy, saying that they have had put my account back on, but the “admin” would send me an email afterwards explaining the situation. Fine. An hour after that, I received a somewhat threatening email from them:

Dear Nhat Le, (Customer ID: 91XXXXXX)

Recently we have noticed that your web site(s) is consuming a
disproportionate amount of server resources. Because of this, we have
had to move your account off of the shared hosting server to an
auxilliary server. We now request that you consider purchasing a Managed
or other Dedicated Server in order to continue hosting with 1&1
Internet.

The decision to move your account was made by the system administrators
in order to improve the quality of service for the rest of our clients
on the shared server from which you were previously hosted.[Why I wasnt’ notified in advanced? You managed to always charge me my money way before I even know about it, so why can’t you let me know in advanced?] The
resources consumed by your account threatened the ability of that server
to capably operate as as a shared host, so it was required that your
account be moved in order to mitigate server load. [By “mitigating”, you mean hacking into my files and disabled it? I will consider to take more actions on this too.]Though we could move
your site back to the original shared hosting server, it is not
recommended. Your account activity has demonstrated that your site
deserves its own server to better suit its performance needs. [Yeah, I’m moving off right now to my own VPS. Thank you!]

Please visit 1and1.com to review the server products we offer. You will
have one (1) month to make a decision and migrate your account over to a
1&1 server or another host provider. [I’m taking action now! And read my lips, I’m not buying anything from 1and1 ever again] You can choose to return your
account back to the shared server, provided that you take steps to
reduce the load generated by your websites. If the account has to be
moved off the shared server system again you will only have the option
of purchasing a dedicated server account to continue hosting with 1&1
Internet.

Please reply to this email promptly. Further questions/comments should
be directed to admin@1and1.com.

Thank you for your compliance in this matter.

–
Sincerely,
John A. Fernandez
Customer Compliance Operative
1&1 Internet Inc.
Internet.

So they decided to automatically move my site off to a difference server even before notifying me. That’s a pretty stupid and bold move that 1and1 mase. Frankly, I’ve been happy with hosting with them (I’m a 3+ years customer, have recommended 1and1 to friends too). After yesterday when my files got hacked into and today with the closing down of my site, 1and1 just suddenly become a crook now.

I did call them up a week ago asking them SPECIFICALLY about the CPU USAGE POLICY, they told me that anything happened, they would let me know ASAP. I still had the email confirmed my talk with the guy from the support staff. So much for such a promise. You just broke it, 1and1. I really want to file a BBB compliant on 1and1’s reckless business practice. After all this mess has settled down, that’s the action I would take to show 1and1 how to treat customers.

Their advertising scheme is too good to be true: my current business plan got 1Tb transfer - that’s a boat load of bandwidth that a huge, huge (mega) site would take a month. And if your site is that popular, you should be on your own dedicated server already. 1and1 is basically offering the same service for 1/10 of the price of a good dedicated system. The deal is just too good to be true. So the catch is when your site got a little popular, they will FORCE you to upgrade by threatening to close down your site. This is really their business practice. They spend money on flashy, multi-page ads on magazines and at the same time, squeeze hard-earned money on the little webmaster guy who got hooked. 1and1 means they one big bad crook company against one of you.

The only thing that would cause me big trouble is transferring all of my domains to Godaddy. That will be a big pain in the neck as I have about 15 domains hosted on my 1and1 account. What a mess they are causing me. I just wasted my day for all of this non-sense.

My take on this: watch out for 1and1. And don’t sign up with them if you want to do serious hosting. Get a VPS or dedicated instead!

I have long realized that I really enjoy reading magazines offline. The computer screen just doesn’t make the cut for me. I love laying on my bed, flipping through page after page looking for new ideas and innovations.

Early on last July, when I was at the Airport going back from California, I picked up the June of the Business 2.0 magazine and skimped through it. I eventually bought it to read on the plane. Well, it was a good $6 or $7 that I spent on the issue as I read and enjoyed every bit of it. So I went ahead and order a subscription for 2 years for a measly $10. I thought that is dirt cheap. 2 years for 24 issues which means it’s 41.7 cents an issue. I know that postage costs quite a bit these days - 39 cents already for a normal envelope! So basically they just give away the magazine because the advertisement subsidizing for the cost of printing and other expenses. Anyway, this is extremely cheap. But I found something even better.

I was just bored today so I hop on Ebay looking for magazine subscriptions. I found a 1 year PC World magazine subscription for $8.99 with no shipping. The price off the official PC World site is about $20 bucks, more or less. You can get a little cheaper than this if you have the special promotion. But for a new subscription, I remember I paid about $12 or $15 the last time I ordered it. Guess what, I bought the subscription. And there are tons of other computer-related mags subs on Ebay too. And I thought it’s cheap. I was blown away again.

I found (and bought) a 3 years subscriptions for Entreprenuer magazine for … take a guess … $6.98 ($1.99 + 4.99 for shipping). It’s 19.3 cents per issue! That is even less than the postage! How can this be possible? Well, I don’t know but one thing for sure, I’ll enjoy my subscriptions for years to come.

Ah, and I am currently bidding on a 1 year subscription of National Geographic for $1.50 but it seems that I’ve been out-bid while typing this post. No worries, I’ve just put in a snipe for it. Let’s do the Ebay’s way of magazines subscriptions!

I just found out today that LastProxy.com was hacked. I updated the code last night to optimize for Adsense and things worked beautifully. But this afternoon, I checked on the scripts and found out that both of the proxy scrips stopped working! I FTP to the site and found out that the scripts were removed permissions and hacked by adding ‘exit 0′ at the beginning. To tell the truth, I’m quite shocked.

First of all, I don’t know why anyone would spend time to hack into the scripts. I mean what’s the point of doing so? Secondly, I am very surprised to see someone actually got access to the scripts’ sources. The scripts should always be executed like usual, and how does that person have the permission to write back to the server to add the exit code to both the scripts.

I called 1and1’s support number (contrary to some people, I alwasy get to talk to a live person within 3 minutes and the guys are very, very helpful and nice too). It’s against their policy to change customer’s files. So I know they didn’t go into my site and hacked it. Then someone else got to get in and did it. I checked on the SSH logs and FTP logs, it seems that everything was clean. Very strange indeed.

Well, I’ve wrote 2 posts on Sitepoint forum to see if other people have encoutered something similar. Let’s see what is actually going on. Meanwhile, I’ll be monitoring constantly the site for any sudden changes. And yes, I’ve backed it up, thanks to whoever hacked my site.

After reading my buddy’s blog (http://blog.tvlgiao.com/) about the PHPEclipse, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve been using the Zend IDE because I love the intellisense feature (a.k.a. auto-complete) of this nice IDE. The only thing is that it’s very slow to start and I had a hard time installing the debugger. Well, now the PHPEclipse package also provides the same functionalities with a complete debugger for FREE.

This is the first time I try Eclipse. My impression: impressive! The IDE loads faster than the Zend 5.1.0 IDE, eventhough both run on Java VM. The GUI of Eclipse is also slicker and it gives me the feeling of working in Visual Studio again. Installing the PHPEclipse was a breeze via the Find & Install featured under the Software Update menu. However, installing the php_dbg with Xampp wasn’t that straightforward.

At the time of writing, the php_dbg.dll is only available upto PHP engine version 5.1.2. The newest Xampp is 1.5.4, which bundles the PHP version 5.1.4. I would recommend you to install the older version of Xampp instead. Xampp 1.5.2 is the one with the correct PHP engine to work with php_dbg.

First of all, copy the php_dbg.dll-5.1.2 to the [installed xampp’s dir]/php/ext/. Then add the following lines to the php.ini file. the php.ini file that Xampp’s Apache is using is in the [installed xampp’s dir]/apache/bin/php.ini. You can see the actual path if you do a quick phpinfo().

[debugger]
extension=php_dbg.dll
debugger.enabled = true
debugger.profiler_enabled = true
debugger.JIT_host = clienthost
debugger.JIT_port = 7869

However, the default configuration of the php.ini will crash your Apache because of the loaded ZendExtensionManager.dll. What I did to solve the problem was to comment out the zend_extension_ts lines towards the end of the php.ini file like this…

;zend_extension_ts = "I:\Program Files\xampp\php\zendOptimizer\lib\ZendExtensionManager.dll"
;zend_extension_manager.optimizer_ts = "I:\Program Files\xampp\php\zendOptimizer\lib\Optimizer"
;zend_optimizer.enable_loader = 0
;zend_optimizer.optimization_level=15
;zend_optimizer.license_path =
; Local Variables:
; tab-width: 4
; End:

After all the zend_ lines have been commented out, Apache started just fine and the phpinfo() dump confirmed that the php_dbg has been loaded.

Hope this help. Now it’s time to do some serious php apps with PHPEclipse. Ah by the way, CakePHP with PHPEclips is beautiful! We now have full code auto-complete for the CakePHP’s library! How amazing! And my friend Giao has just told me that Jseclipse for Javascript now support autocomplete for OOP-JS (prototypes and all that good stuff). Ha, it looks like that I’m hooked with Eclipse already.