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Hostshield_LTD - unresponsive to tickets.
Hi all,
I'd like to understand if this is something to be expected from @Hostshield_LTD or a blip. I recently discovered that Hostshield closed port 25 for my VPS on which I run (or shall I say, used to :-/) a receive-only email server for my family.
I have no idea when they closed the port - the VPS was part of a small mail cluster and I only discovered the port is closed when the cluster failed over to it and I stopped receiving emails although the node was correctly operating.
I opened a ticket with them - normal priority - to ask why they did it and ask for the port to be reopened. No response until this Fri (24th).
I then closed the ticket and reopened it this last Fri at 10:05. High priority this time. Still no reply, no acknowledgement, total silence.
Bottom line I am very disappointed with this incident and would like to know if anyone has experienced this before - I am considering taking the loss and moving away from them, although the machine itself has been running just fine (basically idling as secondary node in my cluster) - no objections on that front.
Thanks for any feedback.
Comments
(I forgot to mention that the original ticket was open on 21 Jan - it was open for 3 days without reply)
I would advice you against it, having older ticket at least will place you closer to the beginning of the queue
You should definitely assume tickets will take days to resolve, and also have a plan for what to do when any provider you sign up for on here suddenly disappears or has technical failures then disappears.
My only mistake in this specific case was to assume port 25 will remain open - for everything else I have my 3-node active/passive/passive mail cluster with VPSs from 3 different providers, to protect myself from individual provider/network/etc. failures..
I might never have noticed the issue had my cluster not decided to fail over to the provider who closed port 25 on me - something I have no control over.
Side question - what does preventing inbound 25 do in terms of protecting network? Does it just discourage email hosting in general?
It might keep the server from being used as an open relay which could get the IP on blacklists.
It can prevent from having a situation in which a client pays for a server today and next day, you are greeted with a plethora of abuse complaints because user has taken advantage of port 25 being open, set up a mail server and sent a huge number of unsolicited emails, that is spamming.
Not only provider has to deal with abuse complaints now but also it has the issue of original IP being blacklisted in various sources and possibly, main domain of provider getting hurt too.
For that purpose you need to filter outbound 25 tcp. IMHO, no sane provider will ever filter inbound SMTP, there are no risks in customer receiving email, the risk is sending spam.
And yet they blocked port 25 inbound. And did so silently - which is what actually pisses me off.
That's a good point. I was only thinking about external clients being able to connect to port 25 if the server had a misconfigured SMTP server. If outgoing is blocked, it wouldn't be able to send.
@lwt Did you ask them why they're doing it?
The first comment here says they opened a ticket on the 21st and still no reply
I did ask, in my original ticket (which remained unanswered)
I won't do any victim blaming here, that's not my intention but did you actually check the company before buying services?
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/11361679
This is a 1 person company, where the director is in Lebanon, registered a UK business using a rent an office place. If you check the company's assets, they gone down, so they don't have any profit, which can be seen under filing history.
I wouldn't trust to a company like that, let alone for getting incoming emails.
Guy can just turn off his computer and walk away and won't be found again.
Lesson learned, I guess...
Update: they replied to my ticket and reopened it. No other explanation.
Most (good) LET providers are.
Duh. Everyone loves their privacy.
I've had nothing but good experiences with Hostshield. He's a Christian and same is his upstream. Christians.
As I made clear in my initial post, I have no complaints apart from the silent (unannounced) closure of port 25. I am also not criticizing any other aspect of their service.
Never had a problem with the VPS itself.