Last November, I switched my work domain, including this blog, over to Siteground due to tech problems and turmoil at the prior ISP. I’ve long wanted to get the personal domain under the same technical umbrella as the work one so I didn’t have to maintain two. I had registered both work and personal domains with Yahoo long ago. It was so long ago, in fact, that the personal one was actually registered through GeoCities while the work one was through Yahoo Small Business. Options were few at the time. The annual price stayed pretty consistent for years and the service level stayed steady so it was easy to stay put. But while price and service stayed level at Yahoo, price decreased elsewhere and service options increased. That’s why I had switched my work domain years ago.
So now over a decade later, Yahoo is also in turmoil. Their main business has eroded to be a fraction of what it had been at one time and their almost accidental investment in Alibaba has turned into their main business due to the rocketing growth of Alibaba. Consequently, they are planning major restructuring including some sort of major change to their web services. They’ve been planning to spin off the web services as Aabaco. But that spinoff was abruptly halted due to Yahoo not getting the favorable tax rulings they were hoping for. And yet since the tech plans were already in motion, Yahoo went through with the change in services to Aabaco while remaining, technically, part of Yahoo. The result is that I need a new login and password to get to the web hosting and domain control panels. But when I click to view the control panels, I see the same Yahoo control panel that has been there for ages. And to see e-mail for my Aabaco-hosted domain, I need to log in to Yahoo mail with the original Yahoo login and password. The reason Yahoo has any web hosting customers today is because those customers have been able to stay put and not be forced into dealing with changes – there is no other advantage to staying with Yahoo. And now with these recent changes, there’s an additional layer of confusion added on top of the aged mediocrity of their hosting system. I don’t see them succeeding with this plan. And besides, for me, this serves as a perfect excuse for me to finally do what I had been wanting to do for years: move the personal stuff to where the business stuff is and have only one system to deal with.
You could argue that having different hosting providers is a way to hedge your bets. Should one of the two get taken over by EIG and dumbed down into oblivion, you have the other to work with still. But of course you don’t get to have both domains hosted in both places so you’d have to execute a move. And moving domain hosting is a pain and isn’t something you can do on your own – it’s you plus the new provider plus the old provider. So the difference between already having a second hosting provider active that you could transfer a domain to versus needing to start new is actually pretty minimal. In fact, it’s possible that a hosting provider that doesn’t have any of your business may actually make the move faster to impress you as a new customer than a provider that does already have some of your business.
The move from Aabaco to Siteground proved relatively uneventful, as expected. Moving the personal blog hosted on the personal site was the only thing that needed a little attention – the mySQL database needed to be merged in to the existing mySQL database in my work domain. And I took the opportunity to archive the current content of that blog which is something I’d been meaning to do for a while. I discovered that Yahoo’s ceiling on memory available to the PHP engine in the blog meant that the archive kept failing but after switching, the archive zipped right through. The performance difference between the servers is striking too – where on the Yahoo server, it would take a few seconds to respond to any click and maybe half a minute to do something “hard”, now clicks happen in a blink, as they should, and the hard stuff takes maybe a few seconds.
So for any Yahoo Small Business / Aabaco users looking at their options and wondering if they should make the leap, yes now is the time to find a better provider. Sure, Aabaco may eventually be spun off and eventually overhaul their platform and eventually become price competitive. But do you want to wait and see if that happens or just take action and see the improvement right away?
Yeah, I was with YSB for 14 years. It wasn’t spectacular, but I was paying for not having to worry about what was going on. With Aabaco, it’s one screw up after another (like the surprise password change), so I’m also off to Siteground too. They’re not perfect either, but they fix their screw ups. Aabaco shut off my site with no explanation, and it took hours to find out they had detected some “malware”, on my site that had hardly changed in 5 years. They couldn’t tell me where it was or what it was, so they made me download my whole site and scan it myself. I told them if I didn’t find any malware, I was going to cancel my service, and there was nothing on there. I guess it’s not their fault that they got some malware scanner with a bad false positive rate, but they clearly don’t have the technical competence to know how to use it correctly. They still haven’t admitted they’re wrong, site’s still down, so adios Aabaco.
We have one 9 years old website with yahoo, it is for a cancer patient care NGO from Indian and we used wordpress for it. Suddenly few days back, we started getting 503 – Service Unavailable error. We thought it may be some server error, and waited for 1 day then we tried to contact Aabaco customer support system (so called). They have only chat and email support (that too they don’t provide email address in their site) and luckily somehow I got a chance to chat to one of their chat support guy. That guy told me that our website was suspended due to presence of malware. That was a shock for me, as we regularly scan our website with wordfence security tool of wordpress and our webiste was not listed in any of the website black lists. Also they did not give us any intimation/alert about the presence of malware before suspending our website. The only solution I got from support was to download all the files clean it and upload it again. There is no support phone number for Indian customers and they gave me one US number to call and get support. It took me more than 1 day to download around 500MB of files (it was too slow), after that I removed all the files from the server. Then I deployed a new version of wordpress application, added all the plugins and uploaded all the required files. Uploading was also too slow. The chat support guys were also very dumb and I felt like they were replying like robots with script. Finally I gave request to start our website and remove the suspension and it took half day to get our site up and running. Now our website is running since last 7 days and surprisingly again yesterday I got a mail that some malware has been detected 🙁 . I mailed them to provide us the list of files that were detected and waiting for their reply.
We are really frustrated with Aabaco small business, and we have to shift to some other service provider. I think yahoo is planning to close their web hosting business, they are just frustrating their customers so that their customers drive away from them. This was really unexpected from a reputed and respected web pioneer company like Yahoo.
Wow what a hassle for you and very unfortunate that the site is down so much. Fortunately, I didn’t get any malware problems like you or the other commenter while I was with Abaco. But I can say that I did see how incredibly slow the network connection was to their servers. I’m in the US and that didn’t help me – though I don’t actually know where their servers are. (When they were Yahoo, servers were in the San Francisco Bay area, I think, even though the domain admin was run out of Melbourne Australia.) Years ago while with Yahoo, my blog was attacked with malware and Yahoo had no idea so I suppose it is better to search for it, though obviously would be better to let you know that something was found and what file it was in! My guess is that they had intended to do that but discovered so many of the sites they host were infected with malware that notifications failed.
Although I won’t flat out recommend any hosting provider, I can tell you that SiteGround offers a service they call Hack Alert which I paid to include in my site. It notifies you of any hack attempts and weekly I get a report of all the pages in my site and a notification that everything is clean. Given the longevity with Yahoo, I know it is tough to do the move. And as I have written here in this blog, moving isn’t easy. But now that the move is behind me, things are going really well for my site.
From reading about other people’s experiences with this Aabaco malware thing, their scanner seems to be flagging certain types of code as malware, maybe PHP or Javascript, regardless of what it actually does. I’ve seen this behavior before in some scanners. It’s kind of an endemic problem in the malware detection industry. They don’t have much motivation to reduce false positives, since that’s basically marketing from their point of view. Very, very few users go and check detections to see what the “malware” actually is, but I do, and very frequently they turn out to be nothing.