HostGator HD & Backup Drive failed, ALL DATA LOST!!

Explain the situation to the manager of the manager and see if any thing else can be done to help your situation. If nothing... Learn from the lesson and keep all the written copy, graphic images and anything else related to your sites on your own multiple drives plus your next hosting companies drive.

You don't have any backups of your own stuff?

We have backups of the headers and backgrounds we created for the sites, but we do not have backups of all their blog posts that they blog weekly about their business and photos they upload showing off their before/after procedures as all this was backed up on another drive with hostgator for that reason/

"Infuriating" doesn't begin to cover this situation, and I'm sorry you're going through it. Definitely keep your own backups, though. At the very least, though, they should completely refund you every red cent you paid them. You should read their complete TOS and see if there may be any way you can collect damages.

I will say this, though. I'm glad I don't use Hostgator. I've had terrible experience with them and have been a happy Bluehost customer for most of my IM career.

You should always have your own backups. Next time do a little more research on hosts that offer more backup options. It's not ideal, but we provide multiple backups for most of our customers, and they are ran nightly. It's unfortunate that this has happened to you.

Also, off site storage isn't very expensive and you should have implemented that from the beginning.

While I do like HG, their specialty is shared hosting.

Oh, please. How does the word "SCAM" fit this circumstance? Seriously.

There as clearly no intent to do this. This is just one of those hard edges and sharp corners life throws in your way while you're heading for a glass of water at night. It sucks, but no-one set out to scam you. And this could (has, will) happen to any provider.

If you don't have local backups of your own stuff, the time needed to recreate it is on you.


Paul

I have been a loyal HostGator customer for 3+ years, I have 2 dedicated servers and 3 shared hosting accounts with them PLUS I am even a affiliate with them and send them a lot of business. This is all about to change if they cant get on the ball here as I have the businesses who lost all their data thinking about sueing me for damages each day their losing business as they are ALL on the top in their LOCAL areas for the services they provide!!

My goodness, that is terrible!

I hope this isn't silly..but have you tried googling your sites and picking up the cached content?

Best wishes. Hope you are able to get most of your content recovered, and that you learn from this and setup a good backup plan.

These days if I were building any sites for other customers, or even myself, I will use Wordpress for the vast majority of them. I then use a simple product like WpTwin and run a backup of the entire Wordpress install every couple of days - it backs up everything, including comments, posts, pages, plugins, images, settings, etc. That way if anything were to happen I always have a local backup of things and it literally takes about 5 minutes to have a site back up online - even if the site has hundreds of posts and comments.

Obviously hind-sight is a wonderful thing but at least now you will introduce some better backup systems into your business. Better you learn the lesson now than tomorrow when your sites have even more content on them.

I do feel sorry for you, just trying to find some positive in there for you.

How did a dedicated server drive fail, in addition to the backup?

Odds of 2 drives failing simultaneously is small imo.

What did they have a building fire? Tornado? Drive theft?

wow... thats pretty scary... If that happened to HG, it could happen to any webhost...

Good luck to you! You are in a horrible situation. Hopefully you can recover and next time remember to keep a local backup of your files. Even if you only do it once a month, at least it's something and you don't have to start back from nothing.

Blog posts and text content of your blogs can be copied again from Google cache, but then it requires time to copy all that stuff again, and if you're going this way, then you have to hurry before Google will re-cache your pages or blog posts.

Both drives failed? What are the odds?

Lesson that need to be learn: always keep your own backup.

To clarify, did you have the basic setup where there is a second hard drive slaved off the server and mirrored? If so, this is something I NEVER do anymore. I use LiquidWeb for a lot of my big time servers and they have real time backup. Sure its $100 a month more, but well worth it in this case. If the data is that important, never have the only backup local to the box. Hardware fails, especially for hosting companies who are trying to save a few bucks on the lower end dedicated boxes. Im not scolding you, this is a tough pill to swallow, Im just saying if it is this important get off site backups or if you cant afford it then manually backup your stuff.

Hello,


What is your ticket number on this issue? It would be extremely rare for both drives to fail at the same time. It's very important to keep a backup of a backup and check them routinely.

Every hard drive in the world is going to fail at some point, and unfortunately this is outside of our control and not something we can warranty.

Hello,

Have them try mounting both drives in a fresh server. Assuming they are UNIX servers, UNIX does a pretty good job of letting you into the drives to get the data, as long as they aren't being used used as the master (and assuming they its a physical harddrive failure).

This is when those bigger hosting services can be a bit of a pain. Your just another number in their books, your easily replaced. The smaller datacenters tend to offer better support (they may be more spendy) in order to keep you happy. I've had a datacenter tear apart two identical harddrives for me to swap out the power supply. Got it working enough to get the data off.

It is very strange BOTH drives would have a critical failure at the same time. Sort of sounds like the backup drive may have failed a while ago. It's a matter of determining the type of failure (hardware or software (ie: needs a fsck)).

Good luck with it.

David

Hey- No problems, won't buy a dedicated server from HG (whatever that means), but I'll continue to use their hosting services. After three + years I've never had a single issue, and whenever I needed advice on using the control panel they were always very gracious and helpful.

I won't share my real thoughts on your claims, however I will state: "I don't see how this post (and subsequent commentary) which really doesn't ask for help, but rather, sets out to demonize HG could be of benefit to anyone... least of all your clients." - Cheers

There is one way that you might recover your data.. you need to get those 2 failed hard drives, talk to them and obtain those 2 hard drives, take them to a professional recovery service.. they take the hard drives to a lab and take them apart and recover everything if possible, most of the services wont charge you if they cannot recover. it happened in the past and those type of places can recover all your stuff so there is still some hope, its expensive like it can go up to 1000- 2000$ .. depends on the size..

I am not sure if hostgator will allow you to take the hard disks since they are owned by them and you are only "renting them" ..

^ Exact same thing happened for me!

I hate to go against HostGator, because their tech support is indeed second to none and their hosting plans are good.

But, I'd say it's a tad shady to lose a primary drive and a backup. Doesn't matter how you slice the cake, there's an element of negligence on their behalf.

Should the business owner been more cognizant of their backup policies? Yes.

Should Host Gator been more vocal that "our backups aren't really guaranteed?" - I certainly think so.

PS: What good is a backup if it's not really reliable?

PPS: I love hostgator btw, I'm just keeping it real.

(Why not have redundant backups for host gator dedicated boxes? People are already paying >=$50 a month, that should include some backup & recovery features imo when other cheaper dedicated hosts charge a FRACTION of what hostgator charges.)

On the same token, there are some things that shouldn't be outsourced. Like backing up important servers.

I could argue either way really. It's a shame. What's best? learn from this unfortunate happenstance.

I just got hacked the other week - that was a night mare. It took me days to get everything going again. Please listen to me. I am tired of sales men. They are full of excuses. Why is it that we pay max money. They give us poor service.

I am moving some of my websites to a friend of mine. He charges only $10/mo instead of hundreds per month and thousands per year. I used to trust in big companies. Hey, no more.

Sorry about the situation dude. Who are you considering next as your Web Hosting provider?

Gonna backup again tonight myself, thanks man. Also sorry to hear about this, hostgator is usually pretty good and this is just...horrible I really hope you can come back from this, stronger than before. Also keep the pressure on hostgator they need to compensate in some way..

I've never aired this publicly before but I'm surprised to see this is still happening over there. This exact same scenario happened to me back in 2003/04. Dedicated server. Paying extra for a backup.

All data lost - no recovery available and run around from support staff for 30 days. I asked to get my tickets escalated to the manager on many occasion without success.

BTW - Sure I had backups locally, but that's not exactly the point here is it.

I finally got feed up and put it to them I'd very likely do a review of the situation to the 30k webmasters I had on my newsletter list at the time.

THE VERY NEXT DAY THE MANAGER OF HOSTGATOR (at least at that time) got back to me and threatened that if I did that (an honest review of the situation and nothing but the facts so people could make up their own minds) he WOULD EXPOSE ALL MY DATA to the world.

This is the MANAGER of the company who you - if you are hosting with hostgator - are trusting your business data with.

Sure enough, a few days later, they "somehow managed to find backups". Albeit 6 months previous but they "happened to suddenly become available" and restored them.

Did I stay with HostGator? No friggen way man.

The ONLY REASON why so many people recommend and promote hostgator is because they have a VERY attractive affiliate program. Simple as that.

I wouldn't touch their hosting again with a ten foot pole at anytime in the future. I should also point out that I could've easily made literally thousands recommending their hosting to people.

But why would I?

At the end of the day I moved to Liquid Web | Dedicated Server, Managed Dedicated Servers, Web Hosting for all my dedicated server needs and have since spent well in excess of US$50k+ hosting with them.

I don't regret "investing" that much in my business for dedicated hosting from a trust worthy business.

If you're hosting with hostgator - dedicated or otherwise - you are taking an extreme leap of faith. You would be wise to do DAILY backups off ALL data on your hosting account.

Best...

Duncan Carver

I keep an Rsync backup of all my servers at Remote Backup using Rsync or FTP. It costs $5 a month. My entire business can be back up and running within hours.

I also backup my home PC to CrashPlan. I previously used Mozy.

All hard drives WILL fail. This is a FACT. The average life span is 5 years. Laptops are worse.

I keep an Rsync backup of all my servers at www.bqbackup.com. It costs $5 a month. My entire business can be back up and running within hours.

I also backup my home PC to CrashPlan. I previously used Mozy.

All hard drives WILL fail. This is a FACT. The average life span is 5 years. Laptops are worse.

I use Wordpress for most of my stuff. There is a plugin called WordPress Database Backup that I use. It emails me my database backup daily.

It saved my butt a couple of days ago when one of my membership sites database got wiped out because Fantastico decided to overwrite the database.

As for all the other content it is stored locally on two different drives using "Alwayssync".

That is not good.. I would never rely on just a single point for backups. Check out https://myrepono.com/

They do offsite backup.

I've never lost data even after server crashes etc, because I use PhPmyadmin/etc to "export" and BACKUP my sql tables regularly from my host, and burn the .sql (or tar/gzs) to dvd, at least once a month. so in all the years I've been online, I've never lost blogs or forums, because I regularly backup stuff.

I also clone my main computer hard drive once every 3 months and have that backup ready as well. after learning the hard way, i've found backing up your own stuff, multiple times, is worth doing

Don't mean to hijack, but thought this was an appropriate question for the thread. I need another backup solution for my dedi. Can you guys recommend a solution (preferably automated but doesn't have to be) that can backup my whole server? Price doesn't matter. Keep in mind I'm not the most technical person in the world. I mean I know my way around my PC, but a server no. Thanks

I'm reassured to see that HostGator is still as crappy as I remember them. In all my years of hosting, they are hands-down THE world-class leader in poor service, poor quality and poor performance. No one even comes close. No one. (GoDaddy 'aint' great but nowhere near in the same league as HostGator). HostGator is the ENRON of the hosting world; their flagship product is the Edsel. They are as robust as the Titanic. They are as safe as the Hindenburg. If they begged me to use their servers, I'd decline. HostGator? Be afraid...be very afraid!