Hostway Customers Have Accidentally Shared MySQL Databases

Wow, this is one for the books. For the past two months, one of our client’s databases kept disappearing, and I was seriously losing my mind, because I could not solve the issue. Hostway told me that “everything was working” and that the database was either “suffering from programming errors” or “being deleted by another party.”

They even went so far as to suggest that it was being hacked. A long shot, I thought, but what do I know, right? So I spent a good part of a day changing every password, checking every connection — even adding reCAPTCHA to every log-in area.

But the database still disappeared. So I logged in to the MySQL page and saw these two data cells:

WhyAreYouOnOurServer

WhoAreYou

Kind of freaky, I know. So I added two data cells:

IAmJustin

IThinkWeHaveAProblem–E-mailMe__justinc@yadayda.com

Since then, I’ve received not one e-mail, but TWO e-mails from people who are Hostway customers who appear to all accidentally and unexpectedly share the same MySQL database. I have no idea how something like that can happen. Probably a coding error way in the background at Hostway.

In the least, it’s good to know I’m not crazy. I’m assuming my disappearing databases were a result of other customers writing to “their” database, which overwrote my data. Anyway, crazy stuff.