Yesterday I was poking around over on echozoe.com when the site suddenly went down. First, I got a “database connection error.” Then there was just NOTHING. That site, this one, and several others I own are all hosted on the same shared hosting server, and everything just went away. I wasn’t particularly concerned, though. I figured the hosting service would get on it and get everything back up and running.
That was a little before noon yesterday.
I spent the day checking back in periodically. The server appeared to be back online in a few hours, but nothing was on it. The sites were gone. I also lost my email, which is hosted on the same server. I checked in three times with support via online chat, and kept being assured that someone was working on it.
This morning got scary though. Not only were the sites not back up when I woke up, it started looking like everything was gone. I started to worry that the hosting service hadn’t been keeping backups. I hadn’t been doing any backups myself because I trusted that they were. There are many customers, and many more websites on the same server as this one. They couldn’t possibly be so incompetent as to allow them all to just vanish with a hardware malfunction.
Then I decided to CALL support. I was on for close to an hour while the support tech checked one thing, and then another. In the end, she informed me that there were no backups, and that I hadn’t been paying for some service that allowed for backups. I started to panic! WHAT?!?! I’ve been a customer for years! I think I migrated over in about 2006, or 2007. Maybe even earlier, I can’t recall. (Before this, I hosted sites myself on a Linux server built from an old PC I wasn’t otherwise using any more.)
Then I asked to escalate. Can I please speak to a supervisor? “Sure, please hold.” I held for a couple minutes. She came back on. “Hello?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
Silence.
“Hello?”
—Click—
Ugh!
Back to online chat.
That tech started doing the same things the previous four had done. I started to express my concern that years worth of website activity on several different websites had simply vanished.
The tech kept assuring me that no, it’s not gone. They’re working on restoring things. Give it 3-4 more hours.
After about an hour or two, I started seeing signs things were restoring. First, the databases for several WordPress blogs (some defunct) were listed in the web dashboard.
Then I started to see folders reappear in the file manager.
Then files started coming back.
Eventually, everything was restored!!!
The last support tech was right! But why had the phone tech told me all was lost?
Panic subsided.
But now, as you’d expect, lessons have been learned.
Back things up!!
Don’t trust others to do it for you!
Yeah, they had been doing the backups that I expected. However, it would have been worth the peace of mind; knowing that I had the backups, so ultimately it wouldn’t matter if they did or not. It might be a little more work to get back up and running if I had to rely on my own backups, but it could be done.
That peace of mind is worth a lot.