This article will be all based upon a familiar site, well, for me anyways. FBhosting.net claims to give out free boards, thus the name FB…free boards. It all started when I was searching google for a phpBB board, for free of course. I came up to a site named freeboards.uni.cc. Naturally, I went and took a look. It seemed pretty good, so I had my board set up even though I had an Invision Powered Board which I much preferred over this one.

Then they put up a deal I couldn’t resist on their forums. Of course, it really was fake advertising, since they were offering unlimited space and bandwidth, but being my naive me, I took the offer. For a measly $10 one time fee, I got myself hosted with a free domain name (chanceforums.uni.cc) and it worked out pretty well and nicely for a few months.

Until…

All of a sudden, when I’m loading my site, I get a whole bunch of installxxx toolbars popping up! Someone had managed to put a javascript code heading to b00gle.com or something like that which made these nasty porn popups come flying out of nowhere. The file could not have been hacked because all the settings on it were write protected unless it was the owner, leaving two culprits – me or FBhosting Admins. And yet again I was naive and just removed that file, setting up another one.

Episode Two, I tried getting onto my website…no such luck. It was down…dead down. Later, in about a day, it popped back up. Then again, it went down for a day and popped back up…and this happened over and over again. Then suddenly, my SQL database went down in flames, but luckily I had a backup to feed my forums with. I tried emailing them and they said that their reseller had been acting up and that they were switching servers. Naturally naive again, I helped them pick out a new server and awaited my site to be put back up and in return, they would give me three months of free hosting from one of their packages.

Fat chance. Their site has been down for two weeks now, server or no server, it’s still lousy administration. And I don’t think it’s lousiness or even laziness…I think it’s just plain fraud.

This goes to say that you can never be too careful when it comes to picking your next host. Horror stories come up like this thousands of times a day from millions of hosting sites. Don’t be one of them in both the customer status or the hoster.