Customer Service Archives - MDDHosting Blog

April 25, 2026April 25, 2026

The Cloudflare 520 Mystery: How a Threat Intel Feed Took Down One Customer Through One Specific PoP

The Setup

A client running an OpenCart store and a WordPress site reported intermittent Cloudflare 520 errors. Initial reports mentioned issues with custom security software they were running (a proof-of-work challenge being injected via auto_prepend_file), which we helped them disable. The 520s continued.

The Pattern That Made No Sense

Over the following days, the client did remarkably thorough testing on their end and identified a pattern none of us could explain:

520 errors only occurred when traffic routed through Cloudflare’s LAX (Los Angeles) PoP
Other Cloudflare PoPs worked perfectly
DNS-only mode (no proxy) worked perfectly
Direct origin access via hosts file worked perfectly
A clone of the site on a different host, behind the same Cloudflare configuration, worked perfectly

By every measure available to them, the issue was specific to the combination of their site + Cloudflare LAX + our infrastructure.

August 23, 2022August 23, 2022

The history of MDDHosting

The Beginning.

I always wanted to start my own web host and the earliest I remember having that desire was in 1998 when I was still in middle school. I had written my own web server software and already had a solid grasp of the protocols of the time. Being young and still in school this got put on the back burner for nearly a decade.

Fast forward to 2007 when I was looking for reliable hosting for one of my own projects and having significant trouble finding a provider I felt that I could trust. This was even before EIG, or Endurance International Group (now called Newfold Digital), had swallowed up all of the common providers. Many of the larger providers were still independent and providing decent but not amazing services.

My decision process came down to Site5 and HostGator at the time, both of which are now owned by Newfold Digital. I will be straightforward in that I honestly don’t remember what leaned me towards HostGator over Site5 but that is where I ended up. Having wanted to start my own provider for nearly a decade at this point I went for a reseller plan with HostGator.

The service overall was ok but not anything I’d consider spectacular. The long and short of it was that the server I was placed on was so hopelessly overloaded that important system wide processes like Apache or Named would crash. Over the first couple of weeks I saw several outages of 1 to 4 hours as services on the server would crash and it would take time for support to fix the issues. There was no way I could reasonably and truthfully recommend my own services to anyone else based upon a HostGator reseller account.

July 7, 2016July 7, 2016

What does “Unlimited Storage” mean at MDDHosting?

I want to start out by saying that not having a limit does not mean infinite usage is possible. We’re all smart enough to know that no matter what storage technology we’re using to power your sites there will ultimately be a finite limit. What “Unlimited Storage” means to us is being free from an arbitrary limit that you have to keep in mind and be careful not to cross. There are several analogies I can make but the best that I can make is to “Unlimited Calling” on cellular providers.

When it comes to a cellular provider offering “Unlimited Calling” it does not mean that you can talk an infinite amount of minutes within a month as there are obviously a finite number of minutes in the month for you to talk. The key here is that you no longer have to worry about how many minutes you have used, how many minutes you have left, and whether you are going to run out and have to upgrade [read: pay more]. “Unlimited Storage” is the same in that while it’s not infinite – you no longer have to worry about running out or having to upgrade your storage to keep running your site.

Many see “Unlimited Storage” as a “marketing gimmick” or a “trick” to “fool those that don’t know any better,” into signing up. With many providers this is often unfortunately the case. There are a lot of providers out there that offer “Unlimited Storage” but when you read the Terms and Conditions there is either an arbitrary limit specified or, even worse, there is an ambiguous “fair use” clause that essentially says that if they decide you’re using too much they’ll kick you off or force you to upgrade. These providers have unfortunately damaged our industry as well as damaged providers that want to offer “Unlimited Storage” to simplify the lives of their customers.

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