Details on Joe Lieberman’s Cheap-Ass Web Hosting

Joe Lieberman’s campaign site, joe2006.com, has been down for a while now. Kos points out that despite what the media is reporting and what Lieberman is accusing, there’s no way that it’s any kind of DDOS attack against the site, and it looks like he just ran out of bandwidth on his cheap account. I didn’t go through and read all the comments on dailykos (have I ever mentioned what a lazy bastard I am?), so I apologize if some of this was already known and I didn’t need to check for myself. If that’s the case you can just stop reading here.

According to Google’s cache (the web host’s site is down right now), the high end account on his web host, myhostcamp.com, offers 75 MB of disk space and 15 GB of transfer per month. Awesome. They also restrict him to only 9 subdomains and only 6 MySQL databases. Also, their uptime guarantee is only 99.9%, which means that he can have 45 minutes of downtime a month. That doesn’t sound like what you want for a political campaign site, especially when you have as much money to spend on the campaign as Joe does. And that’s assuming they’re splurging for the top-of-the-line $14.95 a month plan at that host, not the cheap one that gives you 3 GB of transfer a month.

Oddly enough, they don’t mention anything about buying extra transfer. Usually cheap hosts offering shared web space will let you go over your bandwidth allowance and hit you with a buck or two per GB transferred. Lieberman’s cheap host doesn’t seem to offer that option.

But there are a lot of cheap web hosts out there. How good is this one? Well, their domain has been around since April 2003. They’re not brand new, but not exactly a well-established host. In August of 2003 the host created an account on the cPanel support forum, but hasn’t ever posted anything there.

More interestingly, myhostcamp hides their registration details using a GoDaddy “domain by proxy” service. Companies that take your money and provide you with a service (sort of like a web host) should really have their details available. Who in their right mind would give a web host money when that web host doesn’t want you to have their address or phone number? For all you know, it’s just a 16-year-old kid taking the money and clicking random things in WHM until your site is working. Or, even worse, an 86-year-old retired Elvis impersonator clicking what few random things he can see through his advancing glaucoma. “These damn kids and their Internets full of tubes!”

So how big is the web host? As Kos reports, that IP address hosts 72 other web sites besides the Lieberman campaign site. The most telling bit of information is that the web host’s site itself is also on that IP address. To me, that’s a sure sign of a tiny web host that you don’t want to trust an important site to. A larger, more stable host would have their own domain hosted somewhere else, preferably in a different data center, so that if there’s an outage they can still keep their main site up to communicate with their customers.

Trying to bring up joe2006.com gives you a cPanel-esque “This account is under construction” page, that’s on server1.myhostcamp.com. That brings up an interesting question: how many servers do they have? Let’s take a look. Is there a server2? No. Server3? No. I’d keep trying, but there probably isn’t any point.

So, what do we have? Joe Lieberman’s web host has one server at The Planet (maybe, they could always be a reseller) and hosts 73 sites on it, including their own. They are paying GoDaddy extra money each year because they don’t want their address or phone number visible in the whois information for some reason. They don’t provide a support phone number on their web page. Their FAQ was down (”Error: Could not connect to database”) when Google last tried to crawl it, which was May 16th; it looks like the host doesn’t have any inbound links, so Google doesn’t put a high priority on revisiting and recrawling their site. The Lieberman campaign pays at most $16 a month for at most 10 GB of data transfer.

I don’t mean to single out myhostcamp or imply that they’re a bad host (i.e., please don’t sue me, I don’t have anything worth suing for anyway.) There are a lot of tiny hosts with a single server or reseller account that don’t provide phone service or anything like that. There’s a market for that. But for something as high profile as your campaign site, you might want to take a look at a larger hosting company that can provide better 24/7 service.

By the way, Wonkette found this hilarious quote from the company that the Lieberman campaign hired to do web design and hosting:

2Dog Media has had many experiences with bad hosting companies. From sites not being available to e-mails getting lost, we know the hardships of finding a good hosting company. You lose money, clients, and credibility during those times. That’s why we do the worrying for you and make sure your website is constantly accessible with our hosting product. Get hosting, a domain name, and e-mail for one low price.

Did anyone notice that the Lieberman campaign isn’t listed on 2Dog’s client list? Has Joe lost so much joementum that he’s not even worth putting on a client list? Are they worried about scaring people off? Yes, I checked to make sure that it wasn’t there before. It would be hilarious if they took his name off the list after these web hosting issues, though.