Tarraguña

Recently I had some trouble with my websites.  I wrote about it here and my web hosting company responded here.

Basically the email says a lot of nothing.  ”There are no Dreamhost hacks nor Wordpress hacks.”  Yet in the screenshot of twitter below people who run Wordpress CMS and are hosted by Dreamhost seem to be having some issues.  Do your own search of twitter (search.twitter.com) and see if it is still going on.

While it may be true that it was not technically a Dreamhost hack.  Help us out and find the root cause.  Tell us what the root cause was/ is.  And leave steps to stop it or kill it. Sending people an email saying how it was not your fault is generic and a huge waste of time.  Having read the email I don’t know anymore than I did before reading it, nor have I even narrowed anything down.  

Companies spend so much time on PR spin, advertising, marketing, and playing defense it is ridiculous.  Just make a good product and if and when there is an issue, just come up with a solution.  In the solution you can point out how it wasn’t your fault and I will totally believe you.  I will even think you are the most awesome company for going above and beyond.  But wasting my time only to point out how it isn’t your fault gets us nowhere, except more annoyed with you.

My previous post prompted an email from someone at Dreamhost and it is as below quoted;

“Hello,

I noticed your tweet/tumblr post and wanted to follow up with you here!
We realize there have been a lot of accusations of host-specific hacks,
WordPress-specific hacks, etc lately. Truthfully, there are not
DreamHost-specific hacks going on, nor are they specific to WordPress.
Any site can indeed be hacked, and any host will have some unavoidable
downtime. We’re dealing with machines, afterall! :P In most recent cases,
simply making sure every installation, theme, plugin, etc is completely
up-to-date is the first most important task. Next would be checking your
file/directory permissions, then updating passwords, etc.
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Troubleshooting_Hacked_Sites

This is not to say we take any of it lightly; regardless of the
fault/origin of the recent spread of hacks, it does make a huge impact on
the business of any serious web host, and we’ve been working hard to
effectively clean up current hacks and prevent future ones as best we
can. With that said, please take a look at the email we sent you about
five hours ago called “DreamHost Security Alert - Site Compromised”, and
reply to it directly with any questions. Our security department will get
back to you as soon as they can.

Thanks for your understanding!
Sean”

I have a number of websites that I have hosted by dreamhost that run wordpress.  This month I noticed that some of my sites had a redirect on them to rr.nu sites, most notable femalebodyinsprector and ustream.  This also coincides with reports of Dreamhost having some security issues.  To be safe I changed my ftp, webpanel, and database passwords.  It seems others are having wordress redirect rr.nu issues here and here.  Good news is my sites not running wordpress are still online.  I am guessing Dreamhost only has the databases offline?? But not that I know anything about their structure.  Only time will tell where this originated.  Was it Dreamhost or Wordpress or the combination of them both?  Should I change CMS?  Should I change hosting?  Is anything un hackable? have 100% uptime?