As many in the WP Community already know, Nuclear Moose Candy (website of WP user, fanatic, and team member Craig Hartel) is no longer available. Apparently driven by incompetence, dotCanada has determined that WordPress is the cause of their server woes and discontinued their hosting of his site without giving anyone a chance to fix it. They now have the distinction of being the first host listed under “Bad Hosts” on the WP site. Not that many of you wacky neighbors to our North are out there listening to me, but I figured I would add my support by letting people know to avoid this host. I am also offering use of my server to Craig, although I’m sure he’s had enough people do that as well.
3 thoughts on “But I needs my Moose Candy”
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I heard it hear first. That’s a shame! I wonder how they came to that conclusion? He used too much bandwidth?
For those interested in more information, you can read the original thread in the WP Support Forum. A more detailed correspondence is located in the WP Wiki.
After the initial reports I found dotCanada’s response to be very poor, however further e-mails showed perhaps Craig had just jumped the gun on some things. But the more I look at it, the more I see that this was an issue of poor customer service and technical support. While Craig may have been a little antsy, there is no way it should have taken them 12 hours to respond to a single e-mail (when they claim 24/7 support) when they rather abruptly suspended his account.
A lot of companies have problems communicating with customers in a way that will let them know what is going on. I’m sure a simple message to let him know that they were working on things would have cleared the air before everything went out of wack.
And in the end it was clearly the fault of the host anyway. No matter how they may try to blame their customers, it was dotCanada’s lack of security that allowed one “hacked” account to bring their server down. Not to mention, password requirements are part of a system’s security. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated of a firewall I put up in front of a server if I allow blank or dictionary passwords to be used. And even still, thousands of sites allow such bad practices even today and still don’t have these problems.
I truly find it dispicable that their staff has tried to push the blame on a customer, and balk at Craig’s use of the term “security breach” even when that’s exactly what happened. And why do they find it ok to incorrectly claim he is in violation of the TOS yet his accurate description of their failing is defamatory? Bah, I just hope he has a backup of the site and cen get back online soon.