I’ll leave these mostly in the form of hyperlinks to their own forums:

1) They store passwords in cleartext
2) HostGator doesn’t send maintenance notices through email
3) HostGator throttles emails from each domain
4) Despite throttling (see #3), HostGator’s servers still get blacklisted
5) HostGator’s support team does actually ask for passwords, which is a no-no in the tech biz

I could list a dozen others, but clearly this is ridiculous. I’m moving away from them ASAP and I suggest that anyone else do the same.

If you ever compile Nagios successfully on Solaris 10 (trust me, it’s a beast to get working properly), beware if you get the following errors:

[Tue Jul 01 18:15:37 2008] [error] [client 192.168.0.100] ld.so.1: histogram.cgi: fatal
: libgd.so.2: open failed: No such file or directory, referer: 
https://nagiostest.domain.tld/nagios/side.html
[Tue Jul 01 18:15:37 2008] [error] [client 192.168.0.100] Premature end of script heade
rs: histogram.cgi, referer: https://nagiostest.domain.tld/nagios/side.html
[Tue Jul 01 18:16:03 2008] [error] [client 192.168.0.100] ld.so.1: statusmap.cgi: fatal
: libgd.so.2: open failed: No such file or directory, referer: 
https://nagiostest.domain.tld/nagios/cgi-bin/status.cgi?hostgroup=all&style=grid
[Tue Jul 01 18:16:03 2008] [error] [client 192.168.0.100] Premature end of script heade
rs: statusmap.cgi, referer: https://nagiostest.domain.tld/nagios/cgi-bin/status.cgi?hostg
roup=all&style=grid

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I remembered when I first started doing systems administration. One of the first (and simplest) things I had to do was learn how to generate a self-signed SSL certificate because I didn’t want to pay for one. Well, since my first time doing it, I’ve done the process about 2^18 times now, so it’s second nature to me. But, to some folks who don’t want to read the lengthy explanation on what each step does, here’s a breakdown of what commands you’ll issue on a Linux server. Explanation about the steps will follow.

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