Website broken following migration to greenby
Arrggghhhhhh !!! ... I was about to post about how everything is sorted now and it's so wonderful ... but then I woke up and found yet another problem with this allegedly seemless migration to a dog's dinner that is seriously sub-standard even going by PN's past record of manufacturing canine food products and producing self-inflicted disasters various. At least the fundamental DNS error preventing ftp access apparently got fixed after several days or weeks 
I'm still using the specific IP address that I posted previously.
Not only:
Still way too many unexplained #403 and 404 errors
Still no apache log data available (and unlikely to ever be)
Still no apparent response to tickets raised weeks/months ago
But now we can add permanent #500 errors for everything no matter what following some change done at the PN/Greenby end in the past 24 hours. A site which has worked flawlessly for almost 30 years and continued to (just about) work without issue following the migration was fine yesterday but now it's just #500 all the way.
It appears to be something to do with Apache mod_rewrite and .htaccess so, if you make use of these, then I strongly suggest that you check your site(s) sometime soon to see if they have also been affected by whatever has changed as if by magic so things no longer work.
With regards to email, I got so totally p*ssed off with all the login inconsistencies between different accounts and mailboxes that I took the nuclear option. I deleted and recreated all mailboxes so at least all logins are now consistent and actually work across all servers. I can now access all my old mailboxes on all A/Cs via webmail, POP3 and IMAP whereas immediately following migration, some worked and some didn't, on some servers but not others. Absolutely no good reason for this behaviour because they'd all worked just fine and dandy for anything up to 30 years.
However, I did discover yet another crazy bug/stupidity when adding redirects for some old and now deleted aliases/mailboxes
Despite the 'really helpful and informative' error message, the redirect does actually appear to be added if the page is refreshed and also does actually appear to work. Why the complaint being made is anyone's guess as is whether any redirect will continue to work satisfactorily or not in the future.
To say that I'm disappointed with Greenby is understatement of the year. It's apparently been an incredibly poor 'solution' to a problem that really didn't exist. Off loading the 'free loaders' is one thing but p*ssing off all the loyal customers who've been paying for their service *AND* the services being provided to all the free-loaders is an entirely different thing and several orders of magnitude worse on the stupidity scale.
I don't blame PN as such as it was no doubt forced upon them by BT. I still don't exactly blame ENIX either because my other ENIX services have had no issues whatsoever for the past year and the only unexpected minor issue which arose whilst moving several domains from several hosts over to a new ENIX host recently got resolved within around an hour. Ticket raised circa 0300 hours a day or two before Christmas. Problem resolved by ENIX manually tweaking the their DNS system within an hour. All good stuff and no complaints whatsoever. End result being several mail and web services various moved with zero downtime and no apparent issues whatsoever anywhere. Perhaps because I had a detailed plan, a plan B (just in case), backups (just in case) with everything being very carefully scheduled, uploaded, tested and checked out fully before finally flicking the 'switch' to changeover to the new services at stupid o'clock one morning 
No one would have been aware of any changes unless checking email headers in detail or doing a tracert to sites. That's exactly how things should have been here needless to say.
HOWEVER the BT/PN/ENIX combo is clearly more than a bit of nightmare for customers and being run by complete incompetents. It could AND SHOULD have been so easy albeit very time consuming. Some issues were no doubt inevitable but all the issues being seen are apparently due to lack of planning, lack of testing, lack of management and lack of competency to be undertaking the task.
Everyone involved in any way in this fiasco should hang their head in shame. Most should pay the ultimate price and lose it TBH. In any other commercial situation that I've been in, heads would have rolled by now for technical incompetency.
#complete_dog's_dinner
#even_more_unreliable_and_problematic_than_any_previous_PN_nightmare
#time_to_pull_the_plug_because_the_service_is_completly_unusable
PS: I haven't read any of the large number of posts/replies since I last posted something on this thread. I will try to catch up and deal with anything that neads dealing by or at least over the weekend. I hope everyone else who's been given the sh*tty end of this PN/Greenby stick has managed to resolve any issues they may have come across for now. Anyone with a domain should think *VERY* carefully about making alternative arrangements before migration potentially screws everything up. The cost is £2/month max for alternative reliable and fully controllable email hosting. I would certainly be doing that if my PN email was being used for a domain and wasn't just .force9.net and .plus.com addresses. I would definitely recommend mythic-beasts which I've used recently for temporary hosting and even (shock/horror) a different ENIX brand for full hosting because in my experience it's been problem-free ... but YMMV of course 
@stourchess wrote:
I just tried out my website and all the pages appeared fine without any errors.
Thanks ... but are you using mod_rewrite functions in your .htaccess file(s) though ?
Because that's what the problem seems to be. Greenby appear to have suddenly disabled mod_rewrite hence all the #500 server errors 
@Townman wrote:
I would agree entirely with that if they were migrating Plusnet users into their existing systems, but they have chosen not to do that. Inexplicably they appear to be building a new service from the ground up.
I know
The one single reason why I was quite so happy when this was first announced ages back was simply because I just assumed that I would ultimately be getting almost exactly what I currently had from ENIX. This would be massive improvement on PN and be a very good thing long-term. I was seriously p*ssed off to discover that this was not the case and see just how bad things have been ... and still are ... and no doubt will continue to be for ever and eternity.
I suspect that the reason for that is perhaps relatively simple. Someone is trying to cram way more users than is in any way reasonable onto a typical cloud server in order to meet the required price point. Otherwise, why not just provide each ex-PN customer the 'usual' cpanel based system, albeit with cut down functionality ? They appear to have tried to setup some primitive PN-like system but, sadly, any attempt to replicate the F9/PN systems has clearly failed miserably in absolutely all respects ... bar one :
It's JUST as cranky, JUST as unreliable, JUST as unfriendly and JUST as unsupported as F9/PN systems have ever been at their worst at any time historically
In addition, I would strongly suggest that PN have little to no idea now about how all the various antique systems actually work and how they are configured. Therefore any info or specification passed across at day one is highly likely to contain vast amounts of BS and very little in the way of reality about the baked-in inconsistencies and known issues various across all the historic systems and brands.
You've mentioned the new system defaulting to f9.co.uk a few times in the past. This was a PN promoted thing ages back not something rather more specific to greeby. Initially all F9 A/Cs were username.force9.net PN then tried to get everyone to convert to username.force9.co.uk following what I strongly believe was an unconfirmed data breach. Subsequent to that, F9.co.uk started being promoted as the 'right' form of address.
Things were bad enough circa 2007 and it definitely will not have improved with keeping :lol: I signed up for 2 new A/Cs immediately following the (in)famous data breach. Neither was setup properly by the signup server and required manual intervention by PN over several days/weeks in attempt to work out why and potentially fix any problems. The issue was blatantly apparent because despite confirmation emails various, there was no login to the portal for the new A/Cs. But trying to signup again resulted in username already being in use errors !
Whilst the login to the portal was eventually sorted out it still left one A/C with issues. I can login to the portal. I can send and receive mail. I can see that I have a webspace allocation. HOWEVER, it's fundamentally unusable because I cannot actually login to the ftp server This problem was never able to be resolved for whatever random reason(s) PN may or may not want to claim is the real reason that it's still titsup almost 2 decades later !!!
Right then, my very best big stick is well polished and ready for action so into battle we go. This is all getting very, VERY, *VERY* silly now 
The following is the aide-mémoire 'do nothing' template used for each and every one of my .htaccess files, it's tweaked as appropriate before adding any site-specific stuff:
[QUOTE]
# Options +FollowSymlinks
# Options -FollowSymlinks
# Options +Indexes
# Options -Indexes
# ErrorDocument 404 /404filename.htm
# RewriteEngine on
# RewriteBase /
# *** Redirect Everyone But Me or Everything To Holding Page ***
# RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^XXX\.XXX\.XXX\.XXX
# RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !holding\ page\.htm
# RewriteRule ^.* holding\ page\.htm
[/QUOTE]
Removing the '#' to 'uncomment' ANY of the Rewrite* lines immediately results in #500 errors on all Greenby hosted sites.
HOWEVER, everything works perfectly and entirely as expected for every site hosted on a PN server, a different brand ENIX server or indeed any other random server that I've used at any time in the history of the internet. Indeed it had been working on all Greenby hosted sites that were migrated in November 2025.
This problem is 100% specific to Greenby and, for example, according to this report provided by my 24/7 monitoring service:
[QUOTE]
We just detected an incident on your monitor.
Your service is currently down.
Checked URL http://www.username.force9.co.uk
Root cause HTTP 500 - Internal Server Error
Incident started at 2026-01-19 14:12:45
[/QUOTE]
... and it's been 100% down ever since then
This would appear to be irrefutable evidence that Greenby suddenly decided to effectively disable Apache Mod_Rewrite at circa 1400 Hours on 19/01/2026 for reason or reasons unknown. Still no response to the ticket raised. All my Greenby hosted sites have therefore been 100% unusable since this problem started and can only be fixed by restoring this basic and fundamentally important Apache Server functionality.
PS: According to access logs, no one was even using my network or BB connection in any way between 1156 and 1604 hours on 19/01/2026 so it cannot be anything whatsoever to do with me !
#Different_Day_Exactly_The_Same_Problem
Current status:
- All other sites (excluding PN/Greenby hosted sites) have been 100% available 100% of the time for several months.
- All PN hosted sites have been up and down like a ... and you know the rest of that
It's so bad and so often that the report emails are now getting tagged as spam due to the their frequency. - All Greenby hosted sites are totally f**ked
Kindly get it sorted and/or provide PN/Greenby excuses various on here and in public for us all to have a bl**dy good laugh at
Well, if things weren't already bad enough, then they most certainly are now !!!!! The #500 issue is going to have to wait while I try to sort out the shiny new mess that PN/Greenby have just created for me. You're definitely not going to like what I post when I do post it after sorting this new mess out either. It does not make good reading I'm afraid.
PN/Greenby have not added the webpace product to the recently migrated username.plus.com A/C, only an email product, but they appear to have dumped all my username.plus.com webspace data into my username.force9.co.uk A/C instead which has screwed everything up beyond belief
So not only have I had to spend all day trying to sort out the email issues caused by 1000's of duplicate emails being delivered this morning, change login details various and resolve DNS issues etc but now I have absolutely no choice but delete everything on the server and spend all f**king night uploading the backup.
I hate the morons responsible for this so much
PN: Please ensure that Greenby add the webspace product to my main username.plus.com A/C but there is no need to migrate any data from homepages. I will either do that myself in due course or just close every single PN/Greenby A/C and call it a day on this fiasco.
Well then, I'm not sure if this is kinda 'interesting' or 'amusing' or just plain old sad really TBH, take your pick. It may or may not be entirely relevant to the problem but either way, I do hope that you're all ready for a really good old laugh/cry/facepalm/whatever
Are you sitting comfortably ? Then I'll begin ...
According to the Greenby portal, the alleged server hosting all my recently 100% broken sites is currently 91.204.208.133 which might be very relevant as the issue may be quite specific to this particular server. There could possibly have been a different server being used prior to this Mod_Rewrite issue arising of course, I don't know. But Greenby should obviously be able to confirm if the server IP changed or the server configuration changed at any point suspiciously close to the time that this problem first became apparent. The time that the fault was detected will be accurate give or take 5 minutes I think.
What I do know for absolute certain though is that all of my sites worked just fine (in respect of Mod_Rewrite and .htaccess) at all times on F9/PN servers before migration. They were also fully working on Greenby after migration on 24/11/2025 up until suddenly failing with #500 errors on 19/01/2026 as reported previously. They still work entirely as expected when uploaded to various other hosts. The problem is entirely down to using a Mod_Rewrite directive or command within a .htaccess file in the root directory of my Greenby hosted sites.
However, what I've just noticed is that according to the #500 error message screen print posted a week or so ago, it would appear that this server is running Ye Olde Apache Version 2.4.58 which was apparently released 19/10/2023.
This is despite there being numerous very well known security issues and vulnerabilities (including some quite specific to Mod_Rewrite) in all Versions 2.4.59 and below. All of these issues have been widely publicised and all were allegedly fixed in Apache Version 2.4.60
[QUOTE]
Apache HTTP Server 2.4.60 Released
July 01, 2024
The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache HTTP Server Project
are pleased to announce the release of version 2.4.60 of the Apache
HTTP Server ("Apache"). This version of Apache is our latest GA
release of the new generation 2.4.x branch of Apache HTTPD and
represents fifteen years of innovation by the project, and is
recommended over all previous releases. This release of Apache is
a security, feature and bug fix release.
We consider this release to be the best version of Apache available, and
encourage users of all prior versions to upgrade.
[/QUOTE]
In any case, the latest Apache version is actually 2.4.66 (apparently released 04/12/2025) of course. So why EXACTLY is this version not being used or at least something even remotely close to it ? Why is an apparently bug-ridden >2 years old version considered as being in any way acceptable, even for us pesky old PN outcasts who are simply being on-boarded as a captive audience ripe for financial abuse over the coming years ?
Are the people working on this BT/PN/Greenby project the same as those who were working on PN mail/webmail systems circa 2007 perhaps ? You know, the kind of people who make full use of the company stables as opposed to the company carpark and who completely failed to understand or appreciate that:
- Known software security issues are always important
- Keeping software up to date sometimes matters immensely
- Intentionally ignoring issues often leads to a data breach
Aren't BT/PN/ENIX/Greenby allegedly professionals in the IT business ?
Some things just never change and some people never learn do they
I'm (almost but not quite) lost for words to explain just how much of a déjà vu \W\T\F moment this actually appears to be
Can someone please tell me that I'm entirely wrong about this and it definitely isn't the best demonstration of almost total incompetence that I've seen for quite some time ?
Perhaps this might be of some help to someone going forward:
They *really* are quite different it seems
I will PM relevant info as requested plus further documentary evidence shortly because it's just not very sensible to post any even remotely personal or semi-private data in public on this stupid site because it can never be redacted at a later point in time. All data posted effectively becomes 'owned' by someone else, not even PN, and even if not ultimately used/abused by them, will potentially remain visible in public for ever once the crazy post edit time limit has expired.
PMs will be sent to @Rach_H @plusnettony @dave @Townman
The PM will contain, amongst other things, links to 3 identical copies of the website data:
- Hosted by PN - the original homepages version as copied to Greenby
- Hosted by Greenby - was OK but no longer works due to #500 errors
- Hosted by a different ENIX brand - an uploaded homepages backup
Only the Greenby hosted site repeatedly fails to work as expected. Different machines, different operating systems, different browsers make no difference whatsoever to the results being observed.
