Review Time
I've been a loyal Maxer (nee Spiral customer) for eight years. But my recent experience has now led me to consider other hosting companies:Early this month, for the first time ever, I received automated cPanel warnings that my site was almost at its full month bandwidth limit. At which point, it was implied, my site might be automatically cut off for the remaining three weeks of the month.In response I submitted a top priority support request to Maxer under the title “Is my website under attack?” In (pretty short order) I received the response that my traffic logs showed traffic from AI scraperbots, especially one in particular. And suggested that I might want to add several lines of code to my Apache .htaccess file on Maxer’s server in order to limit this bot.Drawing upon 30 years experience as a webmaster (including 10 years installing and configuring web-severs) I WAS able to safely install that code, which cut off that bot within the hour.But with that reprieve, and again drawing on the above experience, I began to analyze my server logs. Where I found, over the course of the entire preceding week, that that bot had accounted for one quarter of a million successful hits on my site. But that huge surge of traffic, from a single easily identified and well known bot, had produced no automatic warnings from either cPanel or Maxer. Further, digging into cPanel, I found that there was no way of configuring cPanel to send a warning of exceptional ONGOING traffic. Instead it offers only warnings when the ACCUMULATED monthly bandwidth reaches a contracted limit - presumably then prompting an automatic shutdown (or severe throttling?) for the balance of that month. But further, in researching that particular AI bot, the very first websites I was directed to focused on how this bot’s identity could easily disguised (via only a few lines of added code) to let it pass as a well known search engine bot. Meaning that, while the suggested Apache access code HAD stopped that bot’s traffic within the hour, it masters could now easily disguise their bot and renew their attacks at any moment. So I sent another note to Maxer pointing out that because I had in no way left my site open to such a attack, I assumed that even if my site did now exceed its bandwidth limit it would NOT be shut down. To which I received the response:"I’ve increased the bandwidth limit for this month from 200 GB to 300 GB. Please monitor your bandwidth usage over the coming days and ensure it returns to normal levels. Keep in mind that the bandwidth statistics in cPanel can be up to 24 hours out of date. If any specific user-agents are causing excessive traffic, I recommend blocking them. While I’ve been able to increase the limit on this occasion, please note that future increases may not always be possible, and a fee may apply if the issue continues.” In other words, now avoiding a shutdown or fee would be entirely upon my shoulders.cPanel and Maxer software SHOULD have spotted unprecedented, massive, single user traffic my website NOT after a full week (when it was near being shut down), but 5-6 days before that. At which point corrective measures could have been implemented LONG before the site approached its final (shut down?) bandwidth limit.Further, the solution to blocking this well known AI scraperbot should have been implemented rapidly by, if not cPanel, at least by Maxer. Rather than leaving it to a single user who was able to implement an ad-hoc solution ONLY on the basis of unusually long and deep experience with web servers. With the net result that, having now done everything I could do (without excluding legitimate search engines and users), I am still wide open to renewed attack by that bot after a simple disguising name change. And I am on my own.
Warmblood Studbook of Ireland recently switched all our hosting requirements and domain registrations to Maxer. Their expert technical and customer service staff migrated our homepages and email service seamlessly with no downtime. We find Maxer’s staff to be very helpful and highly competent.
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