Web hosting company deleted and formatted all our data - Please ADVICE ???

[Mary_Itohan]

Hi guys,
we had been hosting a web application for 2 large organizations for a couple of years now and due to the heavy usage of the website, we moved to a high end server.

During the process of migration, we copied the webfiles to the new server and redirected the old website to the IP address, and clients where accessing the website and lots of other activities running on 3 days, the host company rebuilt the server, without our knowledge or permission.

They called me this morning, to apologize, saying all they can offer is an apology.

Now this is a very popular hosting company and rated one of the top dedicated server hosting companies.

My anger lies in the fact, that 3 days of data and activities have been losts as a result, financial information, and pictures uploaded.

What can be done ??? Am quite upset, but thought I would ask others ( As the organizations, WE HOST are threathening a law suit, full explanation and reinstate the data )

Pls advice

many thanks

MM

[EastCoast]

If the data is extremely important then there needs to be a strategy for data backup with both redundancy and offsite provision. Unless the hosting is truly enterprise level (by all means name who it is so readers can pass an opinion, though in my mind 'very popular' usually equates to 'mediocre and cheap') then you or the client should have secondary backup measures. It seems odd that there are no backups available (at the very least there should be a daily backup that is off-server). You should check the hosting provision terms & conditions, and also ask why a destructive process like a server rebuild was carried out without consultation.

[ldcdc]

Ask for a monthly refund and give the same to your customers. It's more or less standard procedure in the industry. Beyond that, if the data is gone, nothing can bring it back. If you're sued, you can try to sue your upstream provider in turn.

Other than that, you should have a well written TOS document that your customers agree to, as I'm sure your own host has. Virtually no one in this business guarantees the integrity and availability of data, because said data can be incalculably valuable, and bad things can happen all too easily, be they hardware issues or human error. This is why maintaining backups is, generally speaking, the customer's (or end user's) job.

[coloradojaguar]

I agree that you will want to comb your provider's SLA (Service Level Agreement) and carefully read the TOS (Terms of Service). It is disappointing to hear these types of things happen but they can and do. Daily personal backups are always your best defense against these types of events. There are many different ways you can backup your site and it is something that you will want to explore. Backups are as necessary as a hosting provider. A number of different events can occur which can destroy your data. Don't wait to back it up. Do it now.

[Nexxterra]

People need to quit calling themselves HOSTS and leave it to the professionals that know the proper way to protect data.
It is bad enough that after investing thousands of dollars, legitimate hosts have to compete with a $20 a month reseller. Hosting is very knowledge intensive to do it properly.
Any legit host would know enough to BACK UP!

[CRN Central]

Sorry to hear you lost all your data. Even though we backup all of our customers domains to offsite servers, we always recomend a personal FTP Backup. However, I would contact your hosting company and inquirer about having a disk restore performed. Good Luck!