Is it just me or is that disgusting?

Friend of mine is hosted at BlueHill.com
They want to change hosts, and dont have root, so they asked for the host to TAR their files.

Apparently their policy is to charge 250$.

:eek:

Really not very nice.
They seem like one of the host who try to make it very hard for a customer to leave.

Thats, when you send the host a link to this site, and a preview of your post :D

Call me a cynic, but I might well charge $250 if someone wanted me to do something that they should be able to do for themselves. What's the connection between not having root access and tarring files?

No Shell access perhaps?

<?php system("tar -czf tarball.tar.gz /home/username/directory/*"); ?>

It's that easy - You don't need root access to use tar! :)

For security reasons, a host might disable tar, so people can't untar root kits..... Or other methods of compromising the server...


Besides, using the PHP way, if the file is very large, it will just time out....

FTP or wget to the new server?

IMHO it's bs. Pay $250 just to have someone take a minute to type in a command. :eek: True, you may be able to do it yourself if the security allows, but I would expect any decent host to see that the charge is nowhere commensurate to the work involved here, or at least tell you how to do it.

Originally posted by The Prohacker
For security reasons, a host might disable tar, so people can't untar root kits..... Or other methods of compromising the server...

That's a stupid reason to disable tar. They'd just upload the rootkit one file at a time.

Originally posted by bombino


That's a stupid reason to disable tar. They'd just upload the rootkit one file at a time.


Might not stop them, but could slow them down, and would you rather upload file by file, when you can just goto another server just like it, and do it all by one file?

I agree that $250 is too expensive.

Originally posted by The Prohacker
Might not stop them, but could slow them down, and would you rather upload file by file, when you can just goto another server just like it, and do it all by one file?
Now you're just reaching for a rationalization.

I don't have to monitory my ftp client to upload an entire directory structure to my server - so if I had to do it "one file at a time" that wouldn't even turn my head.

Of course, I would not go with a server that did not give me SSH or Telnet access and all the utility programs I needed to be productive :).

-t

I second what Mark Adams just said: $250 to tar a folder is definitely too expensive!

Let's look at what they might have to do:
1. Type in a few commands
2. Download the tar file from the server
3. Send it to you as an email

While I don't think they should have to do this for free, something between $5-20 would be more reasonable.

Apparently their policy is to charge 250$.

Do you get some KY and a padded bench too?

US$250? :eek:


Robbing Gits!

Total discust!