I’ve been a customer of Network Solutions for some years now. My needs were simple, I wanted some domain hosting, email, and a place to store mostly HTML / Javascript websites. More recently, I’ve been hosting some Ruby on Rails (RoR) apps, as I tinker with the technology. Up until about two weeks ago, there has never been a problem.

Network Solutions got hacked. They’ll tell you that it’s a WordPress issue, but it’s their issue, since it’s their script that sets up WordPress for you. To cut a long story short, Network Solutions seems to have a massive security breach of its file servers. A few months ago, many of their hosted sites were hacked. This wasn’t someone guessing a few hundred passwords. This was someone getting close to root access, and then running a few scripts to redirect some sites. As I can figure this has happened several times in the past six months, evidenced by Network Solutions resetting everyone’s passwords, FTP and otherwise.

Two weeks ago, email started going missing, sometimes delayed for eight hours or more. This was annoying. Then all my Rails apps started breaking, I couldn’t get the logger to switch to DEBUG in production, so it was hard to analyse. Then I did manage to see the error message, and could see that the app was not able to find folders or files reliably. I submitted several tickets. I got responses fourty-eight hours later (not the twenty-four, guaranteed!), that the issue had been resolved, which is odd since we’d barely begun a detailed exchange of information, and more to the point the issue was definitely NOT resolved. I figured out a sort-of solution, which was to “Reset all file permissions”, after doing this everything worked for a few hours before it all went wrong again. I submitted another ticket explaining my solution. I got another “Everything’s resolved” response. A day later, MY solution appeared on their front page, except it wasn’t a solution, since it only worked for a few hours at a time.

I’m no longer with Network Solutions.

Hey Network Solutions! Next time you go hacking through your file system, have the good grace to tell your customers what you’re doing. Stop responding to all tickets that the issue is resolved, and if the ticket is something to do with Rails, or another add-on, don’t give a stock response saying “we don’t offer support for these add-ons”, when the problem is ALL to do with you screwing with the file systems.