If you use Hostnine.com for web hosting, you should go through your sites and make sure everything is working the way it's supposed to.

A week or so ago they made some changes to the server my sites are on that completely hosed most of my sites.

One of those changes was that they upgraded PHP and made some changes to what can be done with the .htaccess file. In the process, they renamed all my existing htaccess files and replaced them with a new version of their own.

The end result was that none of my Wordpress permalinks worked properly, a few sites that had been 301 redirected no longer were, and some sites that I had set up to parse .html files for PHP code were no longer working the way they should.

All these things depended on htaccess commands that were of course no longer active when the files got renamed.

The worst part was that I had to figure most of this out for myself. Their tech support was less than helpful, and was leading me on, saying they were looking into it, instead of just saying "here's what we did and here's how to fix it."

I have to think I'm not the first person to contact them with issues after the updates. I certainly hope they don't keep their techs in the dark about what's going on with the servers.

Something else I learned in the process is that they don't send out notification emails warning about changes like this, because "a lot of people don't read, and immediately report mail as spam. This would cause us to be blacklisted at too many places."

They post these notifications on their forum instead, so you need to visit the forum to find out about them.

Their recommendation to me was to join the forum and subscribe to the announcement sections so I'd receive emails whenever something new got posted.

I'm not entirely sure why that would be any better for them. If people are going to click the spam button and get them blacklisted, they'll probably do it for these forum announcement emails too.

Hostnine is the only hosting company I use that doesn't send these emails out. I get them from every other host whenever they're going to change something that could affect my sites.

Bottom line? I don't recommend Hostnine based on these issues and I'm moving all my sites elsewhere.

I'm not willing to put up with a company that thinks so little of their customers that they are willing to break their websites without any notification and then leave them mostly to their own devices to get things back up and running.