jason222

Unless you like having lots of headaches, or like having to deal with a childish, unprofessional sysadmin, steer clear of Punboy Hosting (and apparently it's going to be renamed to Glide Corporation), a webhost myself, and the others who run my website, recently moved away from (gladly).

Anyway, here goes the whole story about Punboy Hosting.

We moved to Punboy Hosting because of the huge amount of benefits: Linux hosting, 40 gb diskspace, unlimited bandwidth, and a reseller account (under cPanel/WHM), on a machine in the datacenter www.theplanet.com.

The hosting turned out great for the first 6 months or so. However, this didn't last very long, when our website would go down randomly with no indication as to why. The outages weren't short, either, they were sometimes a week or longer. During this whole time it was next to impossible to contact the sysadmin. I emailed him on all of the (four? five?) email addresses that he had given me (and of course, I didn't know which one I was supposed to use. There were no separate addresses for support, billing, etc).

Finally it came down to having to send a text message to his cell phone (one of the staff for the website got to know him quite well before the outage, which was one of the reasons we chose him because of the staffer's connection to the admin)

Finally we got our hosting back up after a week and a half of outage, still no real explanation as to why. (Well, he came into the IRC channel for the website later and told me that he was 'updating BIND' (BIND is a dns server for those of you who didn't know). Well, I decided I wanted to see when the actual update was (since it should not take a week and a half to do the simple job of updating a DNS server). Come to find out, the DNS server executable was never updated at all. (The modification date for the 'named' binary was almost a year before). I never got the 'real' explanation for this.

Anyway, this was the first of a series of red flags for this webhost. We continued being happily hosted using him, until yet again, another outage occurred. This time, our website came up with a big message "This Account Has Been Suspended." We didn't (knowingly) break any rules (besides the point: there was no real contract that we actually agreed to when we first got hosting)

Again, the huge break in communication between us and the sysadmin. Again it was necessary to get in touch with him via alternate means (an SMS message, or possibly a message via AIM) to get an explanation as to why the problem was happening. This time, he turned outright rude, offering a response similar to, "F--- off and let me fix the problem!"

He finally told us that the account suspension was due to some automated process that suspends all the accounts on the system when the total server bandwidth utilization reached 85% of the maximum alloted by the datacenter. (Mind you, the 'main' website for his hosting company resided on the same server {according to him}, but yet was still active) Remembering the first time, we had reason not to trust this. Also, as we were still able to access our reseller login, we went ahead and created an account using an alternate domain, so we could at least keep our site discussion forums active. This account worked for about five hours, and then was also suspended, which led me to believe that a person was there performing the suspensions manually).

These sorts of things continued to go on. Sometimes it would be a demand from him, which we had no choice but to comply with (if we didn't make the demanded change, he suspended our accounts).
Again no real basis for these demands, as he hadn't given us a TOS to follow, and we weren't breaking the datacenter policy either.
Essentially, he made up rules as he went, as soon as we started doing something that he didn't like. (At one point, he went into the database backend for our discussion forums {without asking us} and promoted his own account to administrative status. After we learned that he had done this, he made the claim, "I require an account with administrative access for all discussion forums hosted on my server." This was an unwritten rule, and we were never notified of it. {In fact, he did the changes after a decision was made that he didn't agree with, so he used his new 'authority' to modify topics in the forum to try and sway the decision his way})

The final straw for the hosting and these demands was just last month, when he started telling us that he had to run a 'logging' bot in our IRC channel, claiming that the datacenter had notified him that servers hosting websites linking to public IRC channels must use means to log the IRC channel, and be sure that no file sharing activity takes place in the channel.
I knew that this was probably phony for a couple of reasons. First of all, I highly doubted the datacenter would make a demand like that, considering that neither they, nor the sysadmin for the server, necessarily have any direct control over the IRC channel (our IRC channel was a channel hosted on Quakenet, which already has rules forbidding filesharing in the first place).

Also, he could provide no proof (either in an email, or publicized on their website - we figured that if it was true, they would add it directly into their AUP for all new hosts to read and follow) that he had gotten such an order from the datacenter.
Either way, he suspended our website again until we agreed to let him run a bot in our channel (as we had our own rules preventing bots in the channel), but not only that, he demanded that the bot have operator privileges. (In IRC, operator privileges allow a user to boot or ban people from the channel, or add and remove other operators).
We questioned this, as the bot was supposedly just a 'logging' facility that would watch for filesharing activity. Again, our site stayed suspended until we allowed him to run the bot with operator privileges.

This was the last straw, and we started the move to a new webserver (which we have been completely happy with so far, the host is www.dreamhost.com).

Even now, we get hassled by him with repetitive postings on our discussion forums (located at the new server) asking why we didn't immediately notify him that we were moving. (From our experiences, I figured he would delete or remove access to copies of our databases that we would need to bring to the new server, had we told him of our intentions). I feel it looks very unprofessional.

Some of the posts have been downright nasty.

Anyway, after all these experiences, I recommend that anyone looking for hosting stay far away from Punboy Hosting (or Glide Corp. as it will be renamed soon).