Indialinks SUCKS!

Indialinks sucks! Bigtime!

And I guess I have no one else but myself to blame for getting suckered by them, not once but twice.

Their Linux "sysads" do not know the first thing about how Linux works. (Calling them "sysads" should actually be a joke, since even their "technical" head and the company's owner, Bhavin Chandarana, has no idea of what Linux is about, and they claim to run massive Linux sites. God help their customers.) 

Apparently they live in a make-believe world that they are the best and it is very, very difficult to get that smugness out of them. They charge a bomb, but you have to practically beg them for a single feature that comes out-of-the-box on other hosts.

A very good friend is a reseller with them. I had hosted several sites with them through him in 2010 and left in disgust after one year of hosting. I asked them for ssh access since I needed to install certain extensions on my wiki. Their reply?

"SSH access gives terminal access on server. Users can run commands, view directories and perform many more actions including compiling code, running bots etc etc. This is a security hazard. To host and run a website including e-commerce website, every required actions can be performed from FTP itself. If user still needs SSH, they can opt for VPS or cloud servers."

(I have the emails retained with me.)

This was by their chief Bhavin Chandarana, who may or may not be technically inclined, but if he was advised so by his "technical" team, I can well imagine the hell their customers must be going through. And then they challenged me to show any web-hosting service that provided ssh access! So I was denied terminal access because these fellows in their smugness cannot be bothered to google for a simple read about what ssh access is and how to secure their systems.

Once when my sites were not responding well, I floated a ticket and they replied back that there was apparently a DDOS attack. My reply was that I wanted "to have the details of the DDOS security incident because I'm quite interested in knowing why this attack was launched simultaneously on multiple sites belonging to me."

Their reply: Silence.

Apparently they may have learned one thing: when to and when not to use BS for making your customers keep quiet. I further added: "Are you sure there was a security breach? I think it may just have been a db caching issue. Do you people have Linux sysads in your organization? Managing a Windows server and a Linux servers are entirely different ballgames."

I don't claim to be system administrator, since I am a software developer, and having done software development on Linux systems for a very long time, I can say with some amount of confidence that I know my way around, even though I cannot claim to be a Linux guru.

This was around two years back.

Then again a few days back I needed to host a website and I decided to go with them again. I was given FTP access to their Linux server. (BTW, for all the money that they charge, they do not provide cPanel to their customers, or at least I wasn't.) I tried accessing the database on my other host but they don't allow you to link to external databases since they have fire-walled those ports. Great!

So willy-nilly I had to buy full hosting from them and uploaded WordPress, but when I tried to run the web-based WordPress installer, I got the error "Directory Listing Denied". Indialinks' "sysad" told my friend that it was because I had not assigned a database to my WordPress installation. (I also had a simple index.html file in the directory.) I replied that the database part comes later, a directory listing denied error means it's a straight case of permission error and though I tried chmod-ing the www directory, the error still persisted. No go. "You have not assigned a database" was the only reply I got.

In disgust I bought hosting on some other host and my WordPress site was up and running within 15 minutes on the other host. However I still had to shell out Rs. 1,750 (incl. taxes) to my friend because IndiaLinks had already charged him for that.

My sincere advice to you is that please avoid these people at all costs. They charge waaayyyy too much and their systems are third-grade (I haven't even told you about the issues I had with their ancient MySQL databases), their "technical" team is worthless, and in fact, their leadership is arrogant and smug, they cannot be bothered to upgrade themselves.

On Google, Plagiarism and Info-snooping

One thing I've wanted to write about for a very long time is the fact that though Google is known in popular parlance as a search engine, it would be more appropriate to actually call it an indexer, and a giant one at that. This little nugget of information may seem like a petty distinction to most (if at all "most" know what an indexer means); however, trust me when I say that this fact can have some very strange, unintended, and at times unnerving consequences for many people.

Let me explain. A couple days back, my wife logged into her Facebook account and squealed out: "Look what so and so has written," – so and so here referring to a relative who is both on her contact list as well as mine. Now, if you have used Facebook for any amount of time, you will realize that you cannot do anything there without your business associates, your relatives, your next door neighbor and his dog, finding out about it in near-zero time. (I call it the digital equivalent of changing in a house with walls of glass, but more on that some other time.) Anyway, getting back to my relative's post, I realized something was amiss there... it just didn't sound like him. I don’t know why I had this funny feeling that he may have plagiarized this off somewhere.

I copied a part of that text, fired off my browser, pasted the copied text into the Google search box, and ended up with something like a zillion sites that referred to one part of that text or the other, which was quite useless for me. To narrow down the search, I next quoted the entire text, and hey, presto, Google threw up precisely one site, a newspaper, where among the long list of letters to the editor, one particular reader from the US of A had written in with the exact same text. The entire letter had been picked up by “so and so” and posted verbatim on Facebook. The whole process of finding this out took me less than half a minute… nope, even less, I would say somewhere between ten and fifteen seconds. At the end of it, my wife had that “you’re a genius” look on her face, the kind of look that a man could climb a mountain for. I did not have the heart to tell her that it was nothing extraordinary on my part; any Google user worth their salt could have done it, but then who wants to argue, especially when I’ve nothing to lose with my lady?

So much for creative copying… why won’t Google just leave us alone??? Ah, my friends, I’m afraid the good ol’ days of plagiarizing other peoples’ content and getting away with impunity are long gone, more so in the digital world. (Some day I will write about what indexing really means and its consequences for most of us.) So the next time you are on the www, and are tempted to use the Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V key combos, think again.

But wait, it gets better. One of the things I do when I join a new company (yes, I’m old enough to say that I’ve worked in many of them) is to google for information on all the employees who are associated with me and my work. In fact, in one of the companies that I worked for, I surprised a colleague by telling that his father was a doctor in Gorakhpur, along with a few other pertinent details. Prior to this, the only pieces of information I had of him were his name and the city he came from, which was, of course, Gorakhpur. I would recommend you try this for any of your friends and unless s/he has been away from civilization for the past few years cloistered away in a monastery, you should find something interesting about them.

Go on, try it, I'll wait. In the mean time I will try and figure out how to cloak my information that’s already out there.