TLDR; this site is now hosted on Hostgator. Previously was hosted on Arvixe

I registered the mclements.net domain name back in 2001 or so, over 20 years ago! At first it was on register.com. Then switched to GoDaddy for several years. Then switched to Arvixe for several years. Recently (June 2022) switched to Hostgator.

The first 2 switches were due to price. As I gained experience with hosting (web, ftp, email) I didn’t need the services or support; all I wanted was the servers to be up and reliable. Yet the last most recent switch was due to service & support.

The Rest of the Story…

Starting in late April 2022 I was intermittently unable to access my site or email. No error messages, no response from the servers, network timeout. They appeared to be down. I opened tickets with Arvixe and they always said the servers were up, try again. I would try again, they were not up, so I reopened the tickets. This game of trouble ticket ping pong went on for a few frustrating weeks. Around this time I was returning to the office and realized that my site and email always worked from the office.

Now I had a clue what might be happening: blacklisting – or now that we are changing our terminology to be more inclusive, blocking. I assumed it must be Comcast (our ISP) blocking Arvixe servers. Why? This had happened before over the years, other service provider blocking our emails. I notified Arvixe and they contacted the providers to get off their block-lists.

But this time was different. First, all I could get from Arvixe support was the same canned response over and over: “it works from our end, try again”. They would not acknowledge my suggestions that my sites were being blocked. It was as if they had no support, just robotic answers to tickets. Second, I contacted Comcast and submitted a request to un-block my web site (this link). But this seemed unlikely – if Comcast doesn’t block sites with porn or other offensive material, why would they be blocking my family web site?

Finally I gave up. Arvixe was never going to fix the problem. I researched different hosting providers and picked Hostgator. I used Arvixe CPanel to back up my entire site (including FTP and email) to a giant TGZ file and downloaded it (over 30 GB!). After opening my Hostgator account I gave them access to my Arvixe site and they migrated everything. Site, WordPress, FTP, email, you name it – everything. It was over 60 GB of data.

Transferring the domain registration was a pain. There was no way to do this in the Arvixe UI, so I had to contact support. They sent me the security code to do the transfer. Then the transfer would take almost a week.

After the transfer everything worked great. Until the next day, I had the exact same problem – I could not access the site from home, but I could from work. My site was blocked again!

I used these sites to see if the site was down for everyone, or just for me:

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com
https://isitdownorjustme.net

Of course the site was up, just not for me. So my IP was being blocked. It must be Hostgator. I contacted their support. Within 15 minutes the agent checked my account and said yes, we’re blocking your home IP addr due to failed logins. And he whitelisted my home IP addr. So much better support than Arvixe ever had. But how could there be failed logins from my home IP addr? AHA! I thought – I must have old email clients running on some random device that is constantly retrying to login and failing. I went through all my devices at home: phones, tablets, computers, etc. to ensure all of them had the correct credentials for my site. Then the site was up for a couple of days straight, no problem.

Then I went to reconfigure my FTP client, got the password wrong once – and my site was blocked again. I contacted Hostgator support. This agent was nowhere near as knowledgeable as the first. I spent over 30 frustrating minutes trying to convince him that Hostgator was blocking my IP addr. The agent said Hostgator wasn’t blocking me, it must be my browser or my ISP. Finally, to prove he was right, the agent ran an internal Hostgator tool to check my home IP addr and showed me the output. Of course, within that 100+ lines of output was a line showing my IP addr saying “BLOCKED”. So the agent finally realized I was right all along. My IP addr was on the “temporary” blocklist so all I had to do was wait for an hour or two and then it would work – and it did!

Conclusion

In summary, here’s what seems to have happened:

• In late April, the cPanel based hosting software made a security change, adopting a more aggressive blocking rule. The new rule: a single failed login causes a 1-2 hour IP addr block. During this time, if more failed logins are attempted, it becomes a permanent block.
• Hosting companies (Arvixe, Hostgator, etc.) don’t know about this change. They still tell customers that it takes something like 10 failed attempts in 10 minutes to trigger it. That is incorrect.
• The cPanel based hosting software does not allow account owners to configure this. It is only available to hosting company engineers.
• Arvixe still doesn’t know about this change.
• Hostgator does – I’ve told them about it and they’ve said they will train their agents.