Earthlink: Not Quite Ready for Their Cloud

Within the last year, Earthlink, your modem’s favorite dial-up provider of the mid-90′s, completed their acquisition of LogicalSolutions.net and have moved themselves into the “Cloud” provider game.

It seems like a pretty logical move on their part. Moving to the cloud is the big thing these days. Why, just the simple mention of the word “cloud” in this blog is sure to pull in a few extra page hits. However, it’s not just something you can dive into with a ripped wet suit, one flipper, and a faulty air tank and expect to be taken as a serious scuba diver.

Unfortunately, it seems that Earthlink has done just that. Earthlink Cloud has recently become my go-to example for a bad hosting provider. It would appear that they have the best intentions, with competent engineers trying to make sure everything is running correctly, but a few rungs above those engineers on the corporate ladder there sits someone who is just a little too impatient to get this product out the door and make some money. When I think of a cloud, I want to think about a nice fluffy cloud where all my data is stored guarded by fat little baby angels with tiny golden harps. Earthlink’s cloud looks more like a scary cloud that keeps threatening to turn left and take out half of Florida.

Over the past week we worked on a project to migrate a client (WordPress site and e-mail) off of a Media Temple server (who we love and gleefully support) and over to the Earthlink Cloud. In theory, this is a pretty simple project consisting of 4 main phases: install WordPress and migrate custom theme, migrate database, migrate e-mail, and switch over DNS. I won’t bore you with the specifics of this adventure but here are a few fun points:

• The IP address listed in the Cpanel under “Shared IP address” is an internal 10.* IP address. I’m not really sure what the point of showing this is… but I wasn’t able to find the external IP address to use for testing (or for DNS entries later in the process) and had to finally call Earthlink Support to find out what it was.
• The email is hosted on a separate server. Which is fine if only they had listed that somewhere in the documentation… or given us any information at all on where that was. Again, we have to call to get the mail server information.
• The web-mail links that actually are provided point to the wrong server.
• Mail login credentials were not provided and we had to be given them, via e-mail, by customer support.
• If you’d like to solve problems on your own without having to contact customer support, you’ll be happy to know that the “KnowledgeBase” consists of 9 articles; almost none of them useful, unless you’re looking for how to connect your mail client to the mail server you don’t know about.
• Even though their Cpanel shows the link to do a quick one click install of WordPress, it doesn’t actually work and you’ll have to manually install it.
• If you’d like to test your site before you change the DNS entries you’ll have to edit your host file on your machine to access the server, because, as far as I can tell, they do not tell you how to access the site without it.
• The user interface of the “Client Area” of their site is horrible. Things you are looking for are very difficult to find and there are even buttons that literally have no text on them. (turns out they’re used to access Cpanel and wrongWebmail)
  

  Except for the pixelation, this is unedited.

• Finally, their DNS system is a complete mess that requires a full paragraph… or two.

This client was supposed to be fully migrated to the new server on Friday night so that they could get all of the kinks out of their new mail system over the weekend and be ready to roll again come Monday morning. The Earthlink Cloud DNS mess, however, has had us in a holding pattern since Friday night. The DNS control is made available via Earthlink’s “Client Area” under “My Domains”. Now, if you are migrating a company’s DNS settings from one server to another, ideally what you’d like to do is enter in all of the settings before you switch over the name server records at your domain registrar. With Earthlink, you don’t have to worry about having to do all that tedious testing… because you can’t. Earthlink’s domain control will not let you create any DNS records until you’ve pointed the name servers to the Earthlink Cloud’s name server. So, if you’re hoping for no downtime during this transfer, type fast and don’t make any typos. Also, while you’re at it, just don’t make the transfer at all because it won’t work. Add a record, and it doesn’t show up. That’s right, once you have pointed the domain to Earthlink’s name servers you still can’t make any DNS entries because the service does not actually work. Congratulations, your domain is now pointed to an empty name server.

After quickly pointing the domain back to Media Temple so that the site wouldn’t go down we submitted a ticket with Earthlink (since we had now been working on this project past their call center’s hours) describing our DNS woes. The next day (Saturday) they replied, requesting the DNS records we were trying to enter and they would enter them manually. We provided the records, on Saturday, and then heard nothing back… on Saturday… or Sunday… Finally, today we requested the status of our ticket and they replied by requesting the username and password of the Earthlink account we were using.

You know those security warnings you get from companies where they inform you that they will never ask for your username and password so never give it out to someone claiming to be from said company? Well, they did just that, over a plain text e-mail, mind you.

So here we are. We’ve spent 3 times as long working on this as we thought we would need to, and we’re still not done.

And to the person two or three rungs above the engineers on the ladder I say this: too much, too soon. You’re not ready for your own big boy cloud yet. I’m sure you’ve got the technology and the infrastructure in place to provide a wonderful service, but right now you provide something that doesn’t even scratch mediocre. By pushing your cloud out to the world too early you appear unprofessional and are permanently damaging your business name, and I, for one, can not recommend your service to anyone, regardless of how much money you may save them.