I have been a happy customer of Exabytes since 2004. I even gave good reviews of Exabytes when interviewed by The Star In Tech some time back when everybody was criticizing their local web hosting companies.
Today however I got a rude shock when a domain and webhosting (
www.maribelajar.com) I just renewed March this year was suddenly suspended. My heart skipped a beat because I just quit my job to depend on blogging as my source of income. My Marbelajar.com is one of my main source of income.
I checked my email and there was nothing from Exabytes.
I called up Exabyte office and was put on hold for several minutes. Finally the person on the line told me he would call me back later.
20 minutes later I got a call from System Engineer HP Loh who told me that my website overloaded the shared hosting server. That was why it was suspended. She then told me she would email me the screenshot of the CPU overload.
Several minutes later, I got the email and it only showed 3 offending pages taking up 15% CPU resource. It was baffling as the two pages are from WordPress for my blog and Xoops for my CMS which is pretty standard scripts to use on most websites. I made sure I didn't have bad plugins or addons like forums or chatboxes that would suck up CPU resources.
I liked Exabytes because of the excellent service I got throughout. All my emails were promptly answered within the hour. The last time this happened was when I got hacked thru PHPBB and the hacker installed a script that was overusing CPU resources. The System Engineer just shut down the folder and made it inaccessible. He emailed me with detailed information and screenshot.
All I had to do was log in, remove the plugin form my admin page, delete the entire folder that hosted the script and everything went back to normal.
Today however, my account was suspended immediately without explanation.
This is certainly very stressful for me as I do not know what I did wrong as I certainly would not have installed anything that would overload the CPU. My website traffic isn't even high, about 100-120 visitors per day.
I've just emailed to the support of Exabytes but have not received any answers yet. I don't even know whether my website can be reinstated. My CPanel access is locked and now I have no idea what I can do.
I suspect this is the work of a DDOS like attack that targeted certain PHP scripts. If this is true then any customer of shared hosting can be a victim.
It's certainly sad as I am also hosting MalaysiaOpen.net - a chess festival sponsored by Dato Tan for the Merdeka celebrations on Exabytes. I don't know if the same thing will happen to the rest of my other websites hosted on Exabytes. Out of the blue my website is suddenly suspended.
What can I do now? Anybody else has the same experience?