talim,

maybe you're making your page for fun, but I'm trying to start a business here. so it's pretty stupid to say that this doens't affect my life. it's just ridiculous that you're the only one defending what has happened, even the hostony people aren't.

but you know what? I'm happy for you. It;s great that your so saticifed with your service. it must be a nice wolrd you live in.

nope, I'm with Talim

If you want you're information backed up every couple hours there are hosts out there willing to do it - for a price. If and when you can afford more than 10$ a month (less than my hobby change.) I don't know of any serious 'businnesses' that rent out space for 10$ a month expecting marble floors and hepa-filters.

and there is the rub... for $10, 15, or even $20 a month... do you really expect everything?? (if so, then why do people pay BIG money for VPS and dedicated servers?) hell, I pay $90/mo for cellular service, and guess what? I get dropped calls! I guess I better tell my cellular company they ######... and let me guess what their response would be? okay, find someone else who can do it better. guys, this is a free economy... you don't like the service you get, move on! no one is holding you down. random acts of bad luck do happen... thats life. stop crying about it, and deal with it. instead, you are posting message after message of lame ass sob stories and complaining about the people who think ahead and develop their own backup strategies. if their server room was absolutely obliterated by some natural disaster... would it make a difference that your site had just been automatically backed up two minutes before, and that back-up is in the same physical location as the server? hmmm...

Side note:
365 days in the year * 99% uptime=

3.65 days of downtime a year.

Yep! a total of 87.6 hrs of downtime every year... guaranteed !

"If you want you're information backed up every couple hours..."

yeah, cuz that's what i'm asking for. that's exactly what i asked for in my prior posts. great reading and comprehension skills you have. nice relevancy.

to me its pathetic you guys are making excuses, you sound like you work there.

All I'm asking for is what they said I would receive when I signed up. if they can't provide it i'll gladly go back to paying more with a more reliable company like I did before.

now since no hostony people are actually giving us answers in this thread, i really don't feel like sitting around here with the rest of you and singing the praises of a company that's (so far) all promises and doesn't deliver.

They are not defending hostony, they are rebelling against you...because you are a ######head. No one likes to see others get reamed by a ######head when they can't jab back. You are the guy at McDonald's that yells at the cash register girl because they didn't put 3 pickles on your fat burger. Chill out dude, everyone is upset with the outtage, and they are doing everything as fast as they can to fix it. Do you think they like negative attention? Do you think they are taking kool-aid breaks every 30 minutes just to piss you off? You have a right to be upset, but you come off as a jerk and it turns people off of you....I'll go ahead and say what hostony can't - if you don't like what you get for the price, leave. They likely don't want customers like you.

Amen. I'm pissed off too about the outage, but i've worked in customer service before and there's a lot to be said for being reasonable. they've admitted to their mistakes, they're makeing efforts to fix it, they've compensated us with an upgrade.

The only thing that you could possibly take issue with is the backup only being done once a week, and you could be much more polite when addressing this. If your questions aren't answered properly, then hostony isn't the host for you, and move on. being a jerk doesn't help anyone, least yourself.

I still await a response from Hostony regarding my earlier questions.

Henry.

Further to this, may I suggest that anyone who uses add-on domains might also like to check these are working, because apparently add-on domain information has all been lost during the server move. It seems even the weekly backup doesn't back up everything

Henry.

Henr,

I have the same problem and I opened a ticket and got his reply

Please re-upload all of the files and re-create all addon/parked
domains and subdomains at your control panel.

Sorry again for all of these inconveniences.

but it will not allow me to readd the domains!

Yup, exactly the same here, cannot re-add the domains. I was told it had been fixed, but it's still not working.

Again, I understand that things can and do go wrong, but Hostony should have made clear in this forum the full consequences of their actions - ie not only the loss of data but the loss of this configuration information as well.

I'm still awaiting a response from Hostony to the points I raised earlier in this thread. There appears to be no "official" updates on the situation for about 12 hours now.

Henry.

Try to re-add them now. It should be fixed.

excuse me but this is unaceptable..

no two days finished and i am still unable to access my website.. can you till me why i am getting charged.. for unavailable website.

my website is .. www.aldaih.net.

threfore.. why don't you have a target date for the problem.. keep in mind that i worked very hard and for a long time on this website and i cant loos it like this.. when i talked to one of your technicians online he informed me that there will be no data loos and all our data is backed up.. now it's 75% and i don't know maibe tomorrow will be 50%, beside he told me that the problem will take 3 to 4 hours.. now it has taked more than 24 hours and still not solved.

will you do something and at least give us a target date.

Add-on domains problem not fixed, but it's being dealt with in a support ticket and we're getting closer.

I still await a response from Hostony regarding my comments from yesterday with regards to a) Whether you are going to change your terms to reflect your actual backup policy or whether you are going to change the backup policy to reflect the published terms, and b) Why it took you so long to build and restore the server when there are clearly faster methods.

Additionally, I don't understand why you say you can only backup weekly for performance reasons. I've run many large systems that are both high availability and backed up several times a day, daily backups really shouldn't be a problem. It's not as if the hardware and software are not available. Almost every other hosting co manages it, including many far cheaper than Hostony.

As I say, I await a response on all of the above points. I look forward to "feeling the care".

Regards,

Henry.

I will control my steady stream of emails - I now see that any issues I have will more than likely be resolved. Hate that you guys had this happen and I so feel what you all are having to go through to fix this.

Thank you for the MORE than generous upgrade you have offered as compensation.

Keep it up guys!

Well, I am not happy. I have numerous websites running and already pay for an Ultra Account plus 3 Reseller Accounts - so a token "upgrade" isn't really going to mean much to me.

You state in your terms of service that you have daily backups of the website. I am now finding this not to be true. You have LOST ALL of my databases and state that there is no way to restore - not even from a week ago. You state that my sites should be up....but NONE are. You state that control panel is working....well, I guess it would if you provided me with the password - it seems you've reset it and neglected to provide it for me. You state that email is working.....well, I guess it would if you hadn't reset ALL of my passwords. I use my website and email for both personal and work use. Am I now going to have to have ALL my employees and other users reset all their email? Have I lost all my database settings and forum posts from over a year?

This is truely incredible.

Websites:

celticwarlordz.com
deerfieldstables.com
hollowayandsullivan.com

Pissed off,
Mike

Come on Hostony, are you going to answer the questions which I have now posed several times? I am really trying to help you guys out here. You are trying to build a reputation based on customer service ("feel our care"), but you continue to blatantly ignore me.

If I was a potential customer reading this to get an idea of what to expect from you, I would not be impressed. I would be even less impressed by the fact that as things stand, you are knowingly promoting misleading information about your service. If you are deliberately misleading us about your backup policy, then it is logical to wonder what else published here may be inaccurate.

You know as well as I do that there are literally thousands of web hosts out there, with very little to distinguish them in terms of technical offering and price. Customer service is about the only area left in which you can make yourself stand out from the crowd. Please give me some renewed faith and answer the questions I have posed above. Making a gesture of compensation without addressing the real issues is meaningless.

Kind regards.

Henry.

The issue here is not the hardware failure; these things happen. Managing servers has an associated risk attached in regards to security and data integrity. To mitigate the risk, people do backups.

I'll have to agree with henry. The real issue is the difference between advertised functionality ( daily-backups ) and practise (weekly). Technological problems as "backups take a lot of atime" is not of my concern, since by advertising daily-backups you supposedly have overcome this with a solution.

Oh and to the talins of the world, loosing 7 days of data can be very important in some cases. If you had a S bussiness selling 10 t-shirts each day, (arpox 200$) and you lost all the backorders/accounting/invoices for the last 7 days (200*7=14000$) you would be pissed wouldnt you?. (Not to mention the downtime). And because of the weekly/daily debate, there are grounds for further action. (law)

So what will happen now? Daily backups or a change in the advertisement of the packages?

We'll consider this.

wow, what a surprise a 3 word answer from a hostony employee.

I think that some of you people should understand is that you're damned lucky Hostony does a weekly backup. Many hosting companies won't even do that!

If you run a web commerce site and make money, then I suggest you make your site your life and do daily backups. Hosting companies don't really have to back up shit for you. YOU are the ultimate responsible party if your site goes down, even IF there is a problem with a server on the host side.

The freaking server may not even be in the same state (or COUNTRY) as you. What would you do if the building your server is in catches fire, or there is an earthquake in the area that destroys the server. You gonna come in here whining like a bunch of diaper rashed babies because you lost all your shit becasue you don't bother backing up your stuff? You get no pity from me.

I had a similar problem back a few months ago on Server 10. It was eventually fixed and I had my shit uploaded via FTP and restored to full working capacity within 2 hours (with a plan upgrade as compensation). Why? Because I'm smart enough to back up my shit.

Again, no pity from me. I suggest you take the generious offer Hostony gives you for compensation. Honestly, the way some of you have been ragging on them, I'm suprised they gave you THAT. Most companies would only give you a free month.

Geez.

what do you care?

the moonlanding was faked by NASA

Just like the orgasms are faked by your wife?

an old guy that runs a moon-site is cracking wise about my wife when I'm not married?

congrats about backing up everything. I bet it felt awesome when your server blew up-just, like it should.

meanwhile the company ripping us off is laughing that all you are just expecting to have your stuff crash. gives them no incentive to get better.

Yeah, I guess you're right Eric. This old man who runs a moon site is totally oblivious to everything. Thats why I'm sitting here laughing my ass off at all these comments when I know fully well that lazy webmasters are webmasters who deserve to lose their shit.

The server didn't "blow up", by the way. It was a bad kernal upgrade, then a HDD failure. They had it up and running in a few days. When I walked in and saw the Apache logo on my site, I knew a restore was in order. So I grabbed a cold one and started cranking out an upload with my FTP program. By the time I finished the last one in the 6 pack, my site was up and running.

Oh, and by the way, we're a support site for Orbiter Space Flight Simulator (http://www.orbitersim.com) and we're a mirror site for distribution. We shell out at least a gig a day bandwith distribution. If the server "blew up" tonight, I could have it back up and running in 3 hours.

Yes, It did feel awesome to have my shit in order. My hope is you feel the same way someday.

And no, the moon landings were not faked. You just fell for that Fox crap, thats all.

wow, you transmute a a gig of Hd's every day?

totally radical!

awesome bragging.

btw, the moon landing WAS faked. they did it to draw attention away from UFO's. I saw it on telemundo

Our site does not "transmute", we distribute.

And yeah, we like to brag. Especially since the Moonport site may give the servers CPU the greatest workout. Yet, when I see it's stats in CPanel, it's not even breaking out in a sweat. That in itself says volumes about the hardware Hostony uses.

But tell us Eric, is your site up now? Are you "transmuting"?

And what the hell does "transmute a gig of Hd's every day" mean anyways?!?!?!

wow, stop making excuses for this lame company who falsely advertises. i just left their service, or lack of. no one even speaks english here. be smart and leave before they lose your data again.

I'm not making excuses for any company. What I'm saying is: have no backup for your site and it's tough shit.

And since you left already, why are you still posting here? I left HostingMatters because they were increadible ###### just before I joined here, and I ceased posting on their board immediatly, even though I had lots to say. And yes, they had bad downtime too. And they gave us jack for compensation!

The bottom line is when you pay for hosting, you pay to put your site on a computer that is not sitting on your desk. You have no control over it unless you shell out the big bucks for a dedicated server with a remote reboot option in CPanel. And even then you don't have 100% control. If you want that kind of reliability, put the server on your desk. And even then you'll need to reboot and reconfigure on occation.

The only excuses I am hoping people stop making is the lame assed whining excuses fools give who don't have a backup of their site on their hard drives.

I'm with BigJimW. My sites are also on server10, and we experienced the same issues at the same time.
Backing up your data is, when it comes to the crunch, your own responsibility. If there is one person in the world that you can rely upon, it is yourself. Not your Mum, Grandma, dog, goldfish, or even a helpdesk lackey in another country. (please not i'm not bagging out helpdesk lackeys, i was one in the not too distant past. helpdesk lackeys take alot of crap.)

It's good practise to have multiple backups.
[1] hostony take a backup once a week. that's the first one, but least reliable from anyones point of view because *you* are not in control of it
[2] your own backups. do lots of them! do them often! do them whenever you make a change!

It's also very good practise to make any changes to your site locally, then you can test them in a safe environment. what happens if you stuff up an SQL query and it ends up displaying your customer database to the world? *yay* angry customers!!! if you change locally, then upload, you always have a copy of the most recent version. When you make big changes, burn it to a rewritable cd. keep a few around so you can jump back to a couple of versions ago if necessary.

I will agree that Hostony should not be saying they do daily backups if they don't - but frankly, i don't care - i do my own backups, i rely on myself.

</soapbox>

I still await answers from Hostony to my questions. I have posted the same questions for more than three days now, and have yet to receive any response.

Your complete disregard for customer service is quite incredible.

Lets keep this really simple, and I'll ask the two most important questions again, to save you having to go back through the thread:

1) Will you be changing your terms to match your backup policy, or your backup policy to match your terms? At the moment you are knowlingly and therefore deliberately misleading customers and potential customers with false advertising.

2) Why did you change the nameservers to point to a different IP address for the replacement server you built, when it would have saved a huge amount of time to simply change the IP address on the new server to that of the deceased one. I'm sure there must be some reason you did this, and all I ask is for an explanation.

"We'll look into this" is no kind of answer (I'm not even sure who you were attempting to answer with that post anyway).

I'm fortunate in that I haven't moved many of my domains here, preferring to use just a few to test the service. And obviously I perform my own backups. However, it is still reasonable to expect answers to polite and pertinent questions, especially when the implications go beyond the current situation, ie if you are deliberately making one false claim about your service, what other claims may also be misleading?

As I said yesterday, I'm trying to give you an opportunity to save a little face here Hostony, I can only assume you have so many new customers beating a path to your door that you are quite happy to lose existing ones by treating them with such profound disrespect.

Kind regards,

Henry

Well I see that maybe the message is finally starting to get through and you have now changed your terms to more accurately reflect your backup policy.

I would still like an answer to the second question though; I consider your current lack of response exceptionally rude.

Kind regards,

Henry.

First of all I would like to remind you what RAID 5 means.

It is a array of 3 harddrives and information of each of them is backed up on 2 other hard drives. So your information was actually backed up in real time on 2 other drives and should any drive of the array fail we would put a new drive and raid card restore all data on it from backups on 2 other drives.
So all data was actually backed up over 3 drives.

We also did weekly backup of all data to the offsite data center located in other state.

Now we are also developing software that will daily backup customers databases as most changed data. So all files will be backed up weekly to offsite location plus databases will be backuped daily to the offsite location. Daily backups of databases should not gratly affect server performance.

As you know we actually working on restored data on 2 servers and when new serverwas restored from backup we still worked on the old one and thought that we can restore RAID. It is much more faster and easier to copy accounts using standard tools than to do it manually so both servers should have ips if had a chance to restore old one.

Henry

I personally checked this and otehr threads several times an hour when we were restored data to give cutomers updates about situation etc. Once we restored a server we had so many trouble tickets that all shifts had to work 16 hours to respond them in timely manner. We rarely checked forums because trouble tickets and mail has priority 1 and everything flamed in this thread was already posted in other threads, trouble tickets, and emails.

My site has been down all day.
Hey I want my GOLD membership too Please.
My site is www.zeldaforums.com
I want my Compensation!

So are you going to hook me up with a GOLD membership or what?

Your account has been upgraded to Gold

Am I on one of these server's? ( www.afcommunity.com) If so then I will be upgraded to "Gold" at no extra cost?

Awsome!

Just wondering I have a 6 month contract with the "Special" when it is time for me to pay again will you guys just take the money off the account or will I have to give it too you?

Edit : Just talked to Alec and he answered all my questions, and I qualify for the "Gold" upgrade . Thanks alot this is more than enough to pay back for all the downtime!

Oh and by the way for those of you flaming about how your gonna loose data ---

You should always have all the files you have on the server on your computer also. Make a folder on your computer and anything you upload to your website make a duplicate to put into that one folder. As far as forum's go you should back them up once a day to prevent loss of posts if anything like this happens ( I dont know about IPB but PHPbb has a special place I can backup the databases.). Also if Im not mistaken there is also a backup button you can click in the cpanel .

So stop flaming and start thinking. You knew from the begining the server was failing so you should have eather updated later or backuped everything. Hostony can backup the servers once a week you can do it once a day .

I've scanned several boards in hopes of finding out the estimated time required to fix all of the continuing problems, but haven't found anything but the compensation info.

While I appreciate it that we'll be receiving compensation (which only seems fair, given how frequently our sites have been down recently), I would really like to know when this nightmare will be over and we can get back to administering our sites and our viewers can get back to accessing them.

What is the schedule looking like?

Serge, thank you for replying - I appreciate it.

I can understand that trouble tickets should be the priority after such a major outage, but as you were able to respond to other threads on this forum I had hoped you might have 5 minutes to respond to this one too before now.

Anyway, as I say, I appreciate that you have got round to replying, and also to changing your terms. Thanks again. I now look forward to seeing my account upgraded as you have indicated.

Kind regards,

Henry.

In relation to the upgarde to the Gold package I have taken out a 2 year package all paid for.

When do I qualify for an upgrade and how long does the upgrade last?

my site is calton221.com

I'm on servers 17 and 18 so does this compensation apply to my site or just sites hosted on servers 18 and 19 only?

Compensation applies for server 18 and 19 only,

Hey Serge, I got some email saying I can grow more hair and enlarging certain body parts. Can I get compensation too?

Seriously guys. Hostony treats its customers right. Even in difficult times. When serious stuff goes down, they can't respond to every trouble ticket on demand. They consentrate on fixing the problem first, THEN they respond.

Trust me, I prefer they shoot first THEN answer questions later. It makes for faster repair times when a server goes whacko.

And for those who left because of it.. Well, I hope you enjoy paying more for what will end up being the same reliability ratio. I just hope you have the brains enough to back up your stuff.

Hostony gets three thumbs up in my book.... and I only have two hands.

Most people on the site do speak english...

Hostony is great and they have the best support ever! The downtime was a problem any hosting company could have encountered hostony just had alltile bad luck.

Well thats just my 2 cents worth.

How do I know on what server I am? My site is on 209.152.178.152 ( nonamide.com) and already down from this morning!

Your site is on server18.

And it's working now

Do you have any idea when it will be back online? Are there any more troubles with server 18? kind regards, Eveline

nonamide.com is online, please, renew the webpage and check it.

Still no acces to nonamide.com (209.152.178.152)......

""Sorry! Nothing here yet...

Please come back later:-)"" - is it from your site?