Blog GilaChess

After how late and unprofessional how Exabytes responded on Facebook, they did call this morning (after 2 weeks!!).

To be fair they not only apologised but offered to pass me GilaChess and Maribelajar website data, minus the pictures. That's amazing after one year of shutting down my websites.

Still it was better than nothing. For that I have to thank Exabytes.

If not for bad for publicity on social media my case will just be ignored and forgotten.

But to be fair to Exabytes, and besides just apologising, their representative did assure me that at present they don't tolerate inaction by their tech staff and their servers are at present clean. I cannot attest to that as I have not been their customer for a year.

So am I satisfied?

Of course not! The years of anguish and loss of income cannot be repaid just by sending me a backup text copy of my old website and an apology!

I did buy the domain GilaChess.net as replacement but on the web, the 10+ years "footprint" GilaChess.com was valuable and irreplaceable. Search engines give it prominence. In an ad marketing income world that has lots of value. That is why the domain squatters are asking USD 1800+ and USD 2000+ respectively for GilaChess.com and MariBelajar.com respectively.

Even if Exabytes graciously spent the money and got me back my domain names, can that make it up for all the losses? The loss of revenue over the years is substantial.

I would really like to sue for monetary compensation but according to one lawyer, webhosting companies are very comprehensively protected from loss of data in their agreement clause when you sign up with them. Incompetence/negligence causing loss in revenue is a harder case to prove. But what I can do is to be active and warn everyone via social media, blogs, face to face meet about this company.

The step to get in touch with an ex-customer to try to appease him was a good one but  it's a little too late after so much damage. Also it does not help that Mr Chan (who is now CEO) feels this thing is below him and his minion is charged to settle this minor problem.

P/S: responding via phone call was also smart as that would avoid more publicity if they had responded by replying electronically via facebook, email etc. Sorry, Peter Lim (Exabytes Call Centre Manager). Your forte is soft skills on the phone with customers but what is needed is probably who has authority who can take more active measures.

I've been mentioning Exabytes being a factor in the death of my old website GilaChess.com on several blog posts but I've never fully explained. So here's the full story:

I have been a loyal customer of Exabytes for over 10 years. Yeah, it's been that long. In the beginning it was a good relationship. Website was hosted with no problem and I liked the idea it was a local based company which meant the server load faster to Malaysians who are my main audience.

I even gave a good review when TheStar reporter asked me about webhosting in Malaysia and I praised Exabytes for their great service. One instance was my server went down for a couple of hours and one of their managers, Mr Chan Kee Siak personally apologised and gave me an extra month of hosting.

Sadly that was at the beginning. Things went downhill with some really aggressive malware infection and really unhelpful Exabytes tech support.

The website was so heavily infected that Google put me on their blacklisted websites and nobody can even browse to GilaChess.com using Chrome of FireFox because those browsers will automatically block the site from loading - a malware security feature. Exabytes took precautions like shutting down the whole site until I cleaned the site. I promptly did that but the malware would always come back. Writing to their support they blamed me saying it must originate from my site or computer.

"I was to blame". 

The cycle of hunting down the malware codes but then getting reinfected again after a few days or weeks. You can imagine, it was a tiring affair. Sometimes months would go by before getting infected again. When that happened,  I had to email Exabytes saying "sorry" and ask them to remove the blocks so I can access and clean up my website. After that, I had to go through the process of informing Google my site is clean again so it could remove me from the malware list of sites. That meant days of downtime for GilaChess.com. (Gone were those memories of Mr Chan himself making such a big deal of a few hours downtime and giving me one month's compensation!)

Later, I investigated and the computer that I was hosted on is shared by other websites too and I noticed they were blacklisted just like I was. So I wasn't alone in this problem. Finally it meant there were others facing the exact same predicament I was in.  I did a blog post listing out all my "neighbour" sites and posted on chess.maribelajar.com but like gilachess.com that blog is long dead - thanks to Exabytes. After all this time I still suspect the recurring malware was caused by a neighbour and not me as I have worked as technical support before and am very familiar with the precautions to take against malware and virusses. I also pity my neigbours many whom left their website infected for many months and probably die off because I suspect they just did not know how to clean it up.

Finally, I too just gave up. After over 10 years, GilaChess.com and MariBelajar.com went bust. I didn't renew it last year and the domain expired. It was picked up by some web squatter who now holds it for ransom for the price of...
Conclusion:

All of the pain and suffering could have been avoided if Exabytes tech support took steps in pin-pointing the source of the malware and shutting it out completely. Working with servers I know this is not that technical and almost any competent tech support person could have done so in less than a day. Blaming your customer and treating them like some incompetent fool does not really help in customer relations. Locking up their account and telling your customer to fix problems not caused by them and threatening to suspend their account also does not help one bit. 

Instead today, they have a very dissatisfied ex-customer who will continue sharing his bad Exabytes experience on blogs, social media and in face to face conversations till the day he joins his beloved website GilaChess.com six feet under.



I fully understand that I could be the culprit spreading the malware from my computer if not for the following fact. I also host my other chess sites at DigitalOcean.com and GoDaddy.com at the same time with GilaChess.com and none of them ever got the same malware headaches I suffered from Exabytes.