Hosting Company Erased all my $2000/Month sites

I think there's more to the story. If you want NON EIG companies - google it and you'll find a list.

Servers do fail - and that's common knowledge. I've never had a problem with HG myself - but you have to take responsibility for backing up your own sites. You know that.

Have you tried going into wayback machine or archives of your sites to see if you can find copies?

Why didn't you backup your site? The $2,000/month loss is terrible, but if you had to start from scratch (like now), how fast would it take you to reach $2k/month again? They say the second million is faster than the first.

Hello,
I have seen this before, This sounds like you have been hacked,I also was hacked once, everything went missing, but I use their backup on hostmonster/bluehost, at the time, and removed all bad infected files, myself, so speak to someone else their and ask for their internal back up,

They all have them, then if your running many sites, and many sites have no security plugin and has many plugins not updated, this will happen over and over.

So to fix this once you get everything back up, is to go to WordPress main settings in cpanel, under WordPress tools, and set it to update all plugins automatically and themes, but not the core, you should update the main WP version yourself, now you could leave it to update the main core as well but could cause sites to stop working, since plugins need new to update first, then the core files.

Hope this helps
Thanks Rob.

For my plain html sites, or php/javascript sites, I use a code editor such as visual studio code ( any will do ) using an extension, that when I save the local file, a remote copy is also immediately saved to my hostgator account.
It's foolproof, because if hg fails, I have my local, and as far as keeping my local pc safe, I make weekly copies to a little usb drive sitting next to my PC.

And as far as wordpress sites, there are plugins that let you instantly back up your database, which is most of the site. If you're using childthemes, try to follow the above scenario, where you are only working on the child theme files with a code editor that keeps local and live server copies exactly the same every time you save.

I had a site earning me 1000 a day and the same ting happened to me.
A wise man once told me in Japan...

"Don't put all your eggs in one basket you fool."

Also get a VPS. Shared hosting s%&cks

My condolences at the time of your loss, losing 2k over a month is a terrible thing that can ever happen

How come you have $2K/month but not thinking on having a dedicated server with 8TB or more to backup your files?

It's an expensive lesson.

If you ever motivated on build another similar website make sure you had automated backup set to a storage dedicated server.

Best,

xen

You can get very good VPS hosting on Webhostingtalk forum . this is a forum dedicated exclusive to hosting , I know there are others but this one has huge number of companies and lots of offers all the time

How many sites were there?

One thing worth checking out is Wayback Machine. You could recover them that way, to a degree.

Amro,

This is a good reason to back up your files somewhere outside of the host in case it goes down.

Chris

This is hard for me to understand. I used BackUpBuddy to back-up my sites on a daily basis and automatically put the files in Dropbox. I kept 14 days worth of backups.

My sites themselves were not even eCommerce in any way and didn't generate any income on their own. They were important to my business so I took the action required to prevent disaster.

That said, if you use HostGator, you have nothing to complain about. They are the pits. You pay very little and you got exactly what you paid for.

The OP wasn't hacked.

HG had some servers down for maintenance earlier today. Some of my sites were down for around 2-3 hours intermittently. They all came back up fine a few hours ago.

I wasn't worried at all, because I keep a full backup on an external hard drive and I also "mirror" all of my hosting accounts.

Basically, a "mirror" account is a separate hosting account where you put all the same files up that you have on one account. If, for some reason, my hosting account gets hacked AND my backup gets destroyed (highly unlikely), then all I would need to do is go into my domain accounts and change the nameservers to the mirrored hosting account and I'm back up and running in minutes.

It's good to keep a mirror account because if something happens to my main hosting account, I can switch over to the mirror account in 5 minutes and then restore my sites using my backup hard drive. You can get back up hard drives that hold a terabyte (1000 GB) of data for less than $100. If you are using shared hosting, a mirror account is another $10 a month.

If you are running a serious business and have lots of sites up that are getting a ton of traffic, or if you have paid ad campaigns running, these backup systems are absolutely necessary unless you want to lose your shirt and all your hard work along with it.

NEVER rely on your hosting company to keep a backup for you! Even though HG backs up your account weekly (as long as it doesn't exceed the node or data size limit), you cannot rely on that as your only backup. What happens if they get hacked and lose the backups too?

wow they just erased it like that? What about their support? Did you try to reach them or to open ticket? It is true that you should keep your back ups as well but if they are serious company they should keep at least some kind of backup if I am not wrong (usually hosting have auto-backup option)...

You should ALWAYS keep your own back ups...whether you do it manually on your computer (or external USB drives these days are as cheap as $100 for 1 TB) or you set up an automated back-up system online.

The thing about EIG host (Hostgator had some serious issues even before EIG bought it over - the owner thought vainly EIG could have resolved those issues.) is they will up-sell you on everything they can.

That's the MO of their practice.

What you can do now is check if their have any server back ups to restore and pay any restoration fee. If your site is making $2000 a month, make sure to keep your own back-ups...someone once said, your data is as valuable as your back up strategy.

If Wayback doesn't work for you, try googling your domain. If there's still nothing there, they may offer you an archived page, which you can copy and duplicate on a new host.

Sounds to me like the web site has been hacked rather than deleted by a professional host, just my opinion though.

Yikes. I think take this as a lesson learned and ensure you have backups. Hope you can recover.