Its been at least 2 days now that I can't get into my account, get to the support forums, or see my site on Worldzone. I've had no communication from them, probably because most of my email goes through them.

Does anyone have any info?

Have you tried calling them? If you are not able to get any answers then the best thing would be to move to another provider. After your move work with them to get a refund, etc.

That's an interesting idea: calling. I may even have their number. It's not available on-line right now.

I say that a little sheepishly because I told them just a few days ago that they needed to have email addresses for us on a different machine so they could contact us, but I may not have their phone number!

Hmm. I can probably get it from whois.

Hey azw, can you PM me their # if you have it? I have been with WZP for over 2 years now, and never seen anything like this happen. I have several websites on their servers, and I'm getting pretty damn worried. I DO know that they were hacked into last Thursday, and then they were back up on Friday. Then they were back down on Saturday, and have been down since.

I've always been pretty happy w/ Webdude and Alycia and the rest at WorldZonePro, and I'm quite comfortable with the setup. I really don't want to move to a new host, but they aren't leaving me much choice... It just drives me nuts that I have no idea what is going on w/ the servers. I've been looking at other hosting companies over the last 24 hours, and I really don't want to move, but I'm afraid I may not have a choice...

Do stay in touch on this subject, azw...

Later..

worldzone.net the forums link its the second day now I think there completely reloading the servers after a hack.

Its annoying but there still a damm good host

Hi,
Their phone number doesn't appear in the site, that I can tell (using google's cached pages). And it's not listed in whois.

I sent an email to chris@johnsonlane.com, who seems to be the CEO. But I think his email comes through WZ, too. So that is unlikely to work.

I'll check my receipts to see if there's anything on it.

For Paul_9cy,
I like an awful lot about WZ, too, but this is way beyond "good". You can't just disappear without people moving their sites elsewhere.

Go to www.worldzone.net all the info's there.


There was a mass email sent out to users about all this.

Yeah I think Chris = WebDude

I do know that WebDude (as he's called on the WZP boards) is the CEO.

...and Paul_9cy, you are correct about them being a damn good host. I hope they work things out soon. I'd like to stay w/ them.

Hope we hear some news very soon. This is like sitting in the dark for almost 3 days...

Originally posted by Paul_9cy
Go to www.worldzone.net all the info's there.


There was a mass email sent out to users about all this.

Hmm... My home email address that is provided through my ISP is on my registration and billing info w/ WorldZonePro, and I have not received any sort of email with any news concerning WZP.

Nevertheless, Paul_9cy, thanks for posting the link to the updates. I feel better now that I know what's going on. :)

Take care.

I'm almost positive WD isn't the CEO. Chris Johnson is a different person. When it comes up again, look at the page on who is who at WZ

Thanks, Paul_9cy, for the link to the temp forum. I've been struggling for days to get any kind of info. THat should have been told to us in an email.

Maybe it was, but I sure didn't get it.

Tried the http://worldzone.net and www.worldzone.net addresses, but they're down, too. At least for me this evening.

Anyone hear anything new about the problems?

http://worldzone.net is back up, or I'm now able to see it. At 5 pm (about 10 hours ago) they said they're reloading the control panel.

the emergency forum is at: http://worldzone.net/phpBB2/index.php

The forums have been available non stop for me, so not sure why you couldn't access them? :confused:

Does anybody here represent psoft?

The length of the outage has now reached the point where somebody is incompetent and WZ seems to believe it isn't them.

Are you hosted with them timecheck?

Yep. 2 years now (roughly) but once this mess is sorted out (if it ever is) then I'm hitting the road.

Hi Everyone,

First of all, here is the link to our emergency support forum.
http://worldzone.net/phpBB2/index.php
Emergency contact email: alycia@johnsonlane.com

The hacker took down our mailing list along with the main server, we were able to salvage some of the list but not entirely. We were able to redirect the worldzonepro.com domain to point to worldzone.net, but WorldzonePro.com domain still doesn't want to forward for some people. Once we are back in business I am going to talk to pSoft about an export feature. There should be some way that we can export all our members email addresses to a text file. That way we can store them somewhere else in case of an emergency. Previously, as long as the server was on, we were able to send out a mass email. Unfortunately, this hacker knew H-Sphere, he actually quoted Webdude from the pSoft forum in a message he left us. So our mass email function got wiped out. Next time we will be more prepared. If you give me your email address (you can send it to alycia@johnsonlane.com) I will add you to the mailing list I have running now.

Some people have asked us why we didn't just put up another server and more the accounts there. The reason is because of the Trojan. If we moved the accounts, the Trojan would have shut down that server the same way it did ours, and we have the chance that it would damage everyone's accounts. We were able to stop the Trojan in time the first time around but I wouldn't bet on it twice. We have the clean install in place and pSoft is reinstalling h-Sphere right now. Once they test H-Sphere and it is running properly, they will install the member accounts.

By the way, Chris Johnson and Webdude are not the same people. Chris is the owner while Webdude founded the company. Chris purchased Worldzone back in 1999 and Webdude manages the servers and support.

pSoft is in the middle of installing H-Sphere on our system. They ran into some complications but have already fixed them. After the reinstall is done we will start moving everyone's accounts back in the system.

Thank You,
Alycia Meier
The Worldzone Group

And now it's down and out again - this is becoming a daily occurence.

My site works fine....:confused: phpBB isn't though

Seems they're still tweaking the server software. Could take awhile.

I often wonder if all this configurability isn't more costly than it's worth for a generic operation like WZ. Wouldn't they have to go for a pretty generic installation in order to make us all happy? Then again, I've only read a bit about server configuration in Linux/Unix....

So would it be possible for the Linux community to come up with a relatively secure and generous generic server install, with a generic control panel, so installation and fixes could be pretty darn easy?

I'd guess that those creating Linux really enjoy all the nooks and crannies, so this sort of dumbed down product would probably bore or disgust them. Hey, there wouldn't be nearly as much work to do, either!