We are no longer at the mercy of Spry.com. This website is now running on its own dedicated server. Excelsior!

Music-related posts will resume tomorrow.

I’ve complained in the past about our web host, Spry.com. Pages have been slow to load, email messages have taken an eternity to be delivered, and problems that a reasonably well-trained monkey could fix have lingered for way too long. And then I got this communique from them. The misspelling of my name is the least appalling thing about it.

Any time you get an email address from a company that includes the line, “we encourage you all to keep a close eye on your credit accounts,” it’s time to stop doing business with that company. And that is exactly what we will do. I am in the process of bringing our own dedicated server online, and will move everything from spry’s servers to our server ASAP.

Dear Keneth,

This message is to inform you that we have changed your login information for the following accounts you hold at Spry:

Your billing center login information:
Url: *****
User: ******
Password: *****

Please note that we have temporarily disabled access to login to the billing center at this time. If you have an urgent billing need, please call us at 888-808-SPRY option 2 or email sprybilling@spry.com.

In addition, we have changed the login information for your shared hosting account, and sent a separate email to you with further details. Please note that we have disabled ssh, ftp, and cpanel access as a temporary measure while we verify that the security vulnerability has been fixed.

Because email addresses, mailing addresses, and passwords may have been obtained from our billing system, we highly recommend that you immediately update your paypal or other associated financial information. We encourage you all to keep a close eye on your credit accounts as well.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused you. For further information and updates on the security breach and our efforts to secure our systems and your data, please visit http://blog.spry.com/ If you need to contact us for technical support, please email hostingsupport@spry.com or call us at 888-808-SPRY.

Regards,

Spry Hosting
www.spry.com

Our site was offline this morning because someone at our web host, Spry.com, messed up permissions on the server. It only takes a few seconds to run a chmod on a Unix box to make things right, but it took the folks at Spry.com waaaaaaaaay to long to take care of it. The site was throwing 500 errors this morning, and then the Spry folks stepped in to fix it. Thanks to their intervention, the site started throwing 403 errors instead. Gee, thanks fellas. And they won’t give me any answers regarding how the permissions got messed up in the first place.

Anybody know of a decent PHP host with SSH access? I can’t take any more of this.