Don't mess with bloggers.
www.nuclearmoose.com was a dotCanada client. His Wordpress php blog apparently "ran amok" consuming resources and forcing a reboot.
dotCanada disabled the script, tempers flared and this is the nasty result.
dotCanada did not ban Wordpress as claimed - just the 1 blog.
Lead WP developer Matt (Allusion) called for a google-bombing in the forum thread and placed a "dotcanada sucks - pass it on" link on his website. A vendetta?
Despite the poor wording & tone in the initial email my sympathies are with dotCanada.

Original Correspondence
http://wiki.wordpress.org/index.php/DotCanada

WordPress recommendation:
http://wordpress.org/docs/hosts/to-avoid/dot-canada

WordPress Forum Thread
http://wordpress.org/support/7/4367

Google:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22dotcanada+sucks
http://www.google.ca/search?q=dotcanada

WordPress memory issue
http://wordpress.org/support/6/4587

One of several very good reasons to stay low on the blogging radar. There are plenty of bloggers who are great people, interesting people, intelligent people who do not find joy in DDOSing other servers or taking down a host's server in retribution...but the few that do, are a very active lot.

What actually is *called for a google bombing*? and what is a *DDOSing other servers* is that a denial of service attack?

DDOS is "distributed denial of services".

"Called for a Google bombing" is when one site urges other sites to place a link on their web site to a specific URL, using specific words to link from.

Thankss! Hey thats rather bad for dotcanada, I just looked if you click dotcanada in the google search engine it comes up with all kinds of negative things all written in relation to this one single incident.

Allways their are two sides to the story, and from what I see it seems that the guy got really annoyed just because they shut his site down??

Perhaps they were a bit heavy handed, even if they were is it really really necessary to say all that kind of stuff about them? I mean all that info is plasted from here to kingdom come and could do them no end of damage..

Thats the problem with the internet if you annoy someone they can shout it from the roof tops, but what about if it isn't justified, then what?

That's discusting. At the end of the day it's an online diary. I have one, but even if it was shut down, I wouldn't blink an eyelid.

Someone needs to get out more.

I've just read the entire correspondence and I have nothing but sympathy for dotcanada. I think they were totally in their rights. If the script was monopolising server resources then it needed to be stopped. They behaved in a completely professional and calm manner. I don't think everyone would have been as patient as some of their staff were.

I don't think this is a case of, "beware bloggers", it's more a case of hope you don't get too many clients that take that harsh attitude, or even vendetta against you.

Very sad, and worrying stuff IMO.

I would not have any probblem with using dotcanada after reading the corresondences.

I do think its worrying that it is so easy just to publish anything you like about a company.

The problem is that so many people are going to read about that and make perhaps wrong judgements on dotcanada.

The problem is that is all going to stay their for eternity on the google databank.

I can't help thinking it ultimately is going to cause dot canada to loose some clients. It seems unfair because most people are not going to be that interested to read the entire script, they are just going to think *someones mad enough to write all this, so it must be a big problem*.

Thanks for all of the kind words...

At the end of the day, we lost a client because of this. And that obviously sucks. I'll concede that the original e-mail should have been worded better.

We have discussed the processes on our end on how to handle a script that monopolizes the CPU. And given the same information, we would handle the situation the same - with the exception of a better notification e-mail.

We went out of our way to work with Matt to try and troubleshoot the problem, but we did not come up with any useful information. We even went to the WordPress forums to discuss the issue.

WordPress has the correct information available to them, yet they choose to keep the warning on their website with the inaccuracies. Even NuclearMoose has commented on how the WordPress site has incorrect information.

With respect to the negative feedback on Google - it is one incident. We have had 40% of our signups from Google since the incident, which is roughly our norm... I think many users search "Canadian Web Hosting" to find us, and not "dotCanada".

We'll obviously never know how many clients don't sign up for our services because of this incident. In terms of signups, we have not had a decrease since the incident. I suspect we will have some customers choose to go elsewhere, but what can you do?

As always, thanks for listening.

As per my PM, do not give in to the bullying unreasonable customer. They ARE in a minority. There are plenty of decent people out there, simply after paying for a decent service which you seem to provide.

My very best wishes for the future.

Excellent to hear your keeping good business. It was an unfortunate incident, but what could have been done to prevent this?

I feel after reading all that, that its almost impossible not to get those incidents.

In the words of Sir Winston Churchill, you can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time but never can you please all of the people all of the time :)

I just wanr to say that web hosts should NOT stay away from blogging. It is changing the world. Just because a few SOB are out there, this is no reason to stay away from blogging. Please support blogs.

Daniel

Hmm...I agree that you locking his site to prevent futher damage was a good idea. Still it sounds really fishy to me that same script works fine on one server and doesn't on another? I would just open source and see what is causing the trouble. Also you could apply patch to WordPress itself which would prevent memory consuming. In my opinion your system admins just didn't want to bother.

I mean if the identical software works on another server then it's your issue and not client's. To me you just took the easy road...but hey it's your buisness. I mean don't get me wrong I am not trying to offend you in any way, it's just I had something similar before and I just fixed the php script that was causing the trouble (took me about 2h).

P.S. You didn't tell him what function, what part of code caused the trouble as you didn't troubleshot it at all. This is why I like smaller companies.