Reading the tea leaves: given that the outage started with "connectivity issues affecting the File Manager", which was an install of Monsta FTP [1] - a commercial PHP application - I suspect the file manager got popped by one of the recently published PHP vulnerabilities, and users' FTP credentials may have been exfiltrated.
20 year customer here. This morning I asked their support chatbot if this is related to the PHP vulnerabilities and it assured me that's not the case. I'm skeptical.
They're being awfully vague about this issue so far. 8 hours ago I submitted a ticket requesting more information and they've not responded yet. I guess that they're still in the thick of it.
Having worked in support for years quite often higher layers of the company will give T1 support almost no information on what happened intentionally. That's pretty standard corporate CYA policy in litigious societies.
Internally, sure. But the application that was (probably) compromised was an FTP client, so it would have received the plain text of those passwords from users as they logged in.
I came across such a thing recently. The counterparty was a bank, and they point blank refused to update their processes so the people I talked to had no choice but to continue to use something they knew was hopelessly outdated. SFTP was released what, 3 decades ago or so? There is a good chance that whatever was on the other side of that upload was not capable of any kind of secure connection.
Pricing wise they don’t beat Herzner anymore but are somewhat competitive with Digital Ocean.
I am gradually moving everyone to my own self hosting mostly for supportability reasons. We want to react in seconds, not hours, when a customer has an issue.
I've been a user for more than 20 years. With their shared hosting plan, which was about $5/mo. when I joined and is now $13/mo, I've been able to host my personal blog and professional site, as well as probably 3 dozen other sites over the years, including several that have hit the HN front page and never got hugged by the squeeze of death.
Honestly, compared to some of the professional environments I've worked in, it's a joy to have an idea, create a few PHP files, and in a matter of seconds have that idea live.
It's cheap and reliable with predictable costs. It hasn't caused me any problems in a decade. Most of the websites I want to host don't need cloud anything, they're statically generated.
[1]: https://www.monstaftp.com/
These status updates from the PHP incident would also have us believe that they were never directly affected: https://www.dreamhoststatus.com/pages/incident/575f0f6068263...
They're being awfully vague about this issue so far. 8 hours ago I submitted a ticket requesting more information and they've not responded yet. I guess that they're still in the thick of it.
Having worked in support for years quite often higher layers of the company will give T1 support almost no information on what happened intentionally. That's pretty standard corporate CYA policy in litigious societies.
As a precaution they reset everyone’s email passwords, presumably from an assumption people use the same ones for both.
I’m surprise they still let people use FTP.
Support is primarily via chat these days.
Pricing wise they don’t beat Herzner anymore but are somewhat competitive with Digital Ocean.
I am gradually moving everyone to my own self hosting mostly for supportability reasons. We want to react in seconds, not hours, when a customer has an issue.
Honestly, compared to some of the professional environments I've worked in, it's a joy to have an idea, create a few PHP files, and in a matter of seconds have that idea live.