Hosting company screwed up.. this happen to you?

by gmack

Posted: 13 years ago 17 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

WOW!

I can't believe this happened! I won't trash the hosting company here, but I had a ton of SEO work done on one of my client sites at considerable expense (I have about 60 sites on the server). Guaranteed top 3 rankings, blah blah.

Did the work. Saved it. Checked it. Checked source code for days. Checked rankings recently. Not much improvement, if any. Waited until today to challenge the SEO company and their work asking for a refund. No problem. They'll give it back. Then they informed me that none of the optimization they gave me to add to the site was there. What?!

Thought I'd lost my mind. I don't even DRINK anymore! (Maybe I should.)

Then, I remembered a few weeks back, there was an 'outage' on my server. It was out for a few hours. Eventually came back on and all 'appeared' to be fine... until today when the SEO company told me it wasn't. I went into the site and NONE of the work was there. After hours of head scratching, I've surmised that the 'outage' is the only explanation and the hosting company 'must' have used old data to re-publish the site without telling me.

No admission from the hosting company on this. Still waiting for an 'official' explanation. Meanwhile, client is pissed because no results for their money. Got egg on my face for getting on the SEO company that I'm now sucking up to... Geez. What a day!

Has this happened to anyone else with 'phantom' web stealers going bump in the night reverting sites to their old form?

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinkin'.

#company #happen #hosting #lost data #screwed

~kev~ 13 years ago

Hosting company probably restored the server from backup.

I dont think its anything to be mad about, its life and stuff happens.
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SteveJohnson 13 years ago

It's likely to be as Kev says, the server was restored from a backup.

I would be extremely unhappy if I wasn't notified by the hosting company about it, though. At least you'd have an intelligent answer for your client.
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BloggingPro 13 years ago

To the best of my knowledge this has never happened to me. But if it did, I would be pretty upset if my webhost didn't notify me that a back-up was processed. I mean at that point the only thing left to do would be the crying... so I guess if it pissed me off that bad I'd just take my sites elsewhere.
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MrCopy 13 years ago

If you have a lot of data-driven sites, it's very tough to migrate them properly.
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- BloggingPro 13 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by MrCopy
  
  If you have a lot of data-driven sites, it's very tough to migrate them properly.
  
  Not to argue, but isn't it as easy as exporting your databases and website files, then creating a new database and importing all the files at your new host?
  
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  jvdeals 13 years ago
  
  To backup and migrate your WordPress sites use iThemes BackUpBuddy. It has saved me a lot. Here's the link...
  BackupBuddy : PluginBuddy | WordPress Plugins
  
  Hope this helps.
  
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mojojuju 13 years ago

Never trust your hosting company to keep backups for you. If you want to be safe, you need to make your own backups. But you already know this now.
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:)
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Brian Alaway 13 years ago

That sucks. Daily backups stored off your hosting site is about the only thing you can do to protect yourself from something like this. If a host did that to me without notifying me, they wouldn't remain my host for long.
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richgrad 13 years ago

are you using wordpress and a cache plugin?
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- Nick Bykov Banned 13 years ago
  
  Yeah, they've probably restored the data from an old backup. It's always wise to have your own off-server fresh backup copies.
  
  Originally Posted by richgrad
  
  are you using wordpress and a cache plugin?
  
  That may be the case. Try disabling it.
  
  [still can't get why people use WP Cache on their low traffic sites... :p]
  
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  mojojuju 13 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Nick Bykov
  
  [still can't get why people use WP Cache on their low traffic sites... :p]
  
  I don't know about others, but I cache everything that's cachable because it contributes to faster loading pages. People tend to like that (fast loading pages). It makes no sense to me that people don't cache pages that can be cached.
  
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  :)
  
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  BloggingPro 13 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Nick Bykov
  
  [still can't get why people use WP Cache on their low traffic sites... :p]
  
  I cache on a low traffic site because its image-heavy. Whatever I can do to decrease load times I will do.
  
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JamesGw 13 years ago

I've seen stuff like this happen. It's pretty normal for a hosting company to upload an older version of the site. This is why you should be making weekly or even daily backups on your own. Never put your work and reputation 100% in the hands of someone else (or another company.)

Lesson learned.
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wrongnumber 13 years ago

well... this is something even they cant notify you about, because... sometimes some hosts (or probably it will be their standard explanation) that they suffered a chain attach or something and this corrupted the entire network... the traffic brought the network down.... or something like that.... sometime ago this happened at awardspace.... i was running a traffic campaign using my hosting as traffic server.... and whoops the entire system went down.... all websites down... emails down.... it took them 3 days to recover entirely... luckily the backup they published was just an hour older than the attack... so we were a bit relieved... .... do not worry... just a part of life... the best part... you would not be alone to suffer the same way.... all the best man!...
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Ryan777 13 years ago

I haven't had this particular problem, but I did have an issue where my host accidentally deleted my site. They didn't have a back up of it either. The worst part was that it had been created using software I no longer had so I couldn't get the site back the way it had been. I got some free hosting out of it and learned the hard lesson of backing my stuff up myself, so I guess it wasn't a total loss.
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gmack 13 years ago

Thanks everyone for the feedback!

Bottom line, it's my site and I should be the one to backup everything each time I do something on one of my sites, so I take that part of the responsibility. Just disappointed that my hosting company - probably the largest one around and has been great for my business needs in the past - says that NOTHING happened and there was NO outage at all.

Not the end of the world, and I'm glad I'm not alone in the hosting 'screw ups' department. Lesson learned.

Thanks again!

Greg
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- LisaSchwartz 13 years ago
  
  Yes, it is important to keep backups. I recently went with a very risky choice of host, webhostingplex.com and these guys always think everything is the customers fault. Their service is so spotty, I finally moved over to hostgator again. I really wanted the seo hosting which was their differentiation. and can you believe these guys also run a huge blog backbone too? wow, you have to be really careful who you choose and also make backups. because hosting companies unless they are larger and you can contact them by phone are a scary thing, especially when it's your client sites. And as soon as you stop paying (even if they truly owe you a refund for poor SLA) they just terminate your accounts. They are complete idiots that way. I'll never use seo-host or webhostingplex.com again and would not recommend you do either.
  
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