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Blog Date: Monday, October 30, 2006

Pipex? Shmipex.

Not happy. Not one little bit. The company that hosts this website cocked up big-style the evening of Friday 27th Oct. They were supposed to be upgrading/replacing a disk, but managed to screw that up, wiping it clean of all its data (including this website). Then, in what I can only see as a moment of utter professional stupidity, let the tape backup run on the newly blanked disk. Thus removing the chance of restoring anything!

I noticed this on Saturday whilst trying to log onto the site. I was getting a "404 Not Found", so I investigated to discover the complete and utter lack of a website on the hosting server.

I called the tech dept who informed me of their error by way of pointing me to wards this status page. I doubt the text will stay there long so here it is in full:

... During the replacement of the drive the server suffered a systems failure which resulted in the loss of virtually all web site data from this server. The emails and database files remained intact. While we have backups for disaster recover, at this exact moment the backup service started running and overwrote the backups with blank data.

As a result, customers hosted on the platinum server will need to restore their websites from their own backups.

We would like to assure customers that failures of this nature are very rare and we have escalated this matter to the highest level to ensure all avenues have been explored.

We fundamentally apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Idiots! I work in a hosted server environment and the one thing you always make sure of when something goes wrong, is that you have your backups secured and out of danger. And TBH, you should always have multiple backups.

I'm lucky in that I had a complete site back up on my PC and burnt onto DVD so I didn't loose any data, but I bet there a a bunch of folks out there who aren't so lucky or cautious. Nonetheless, I still had to spend most of today restoring this website over a standard broadband slow upload connection. The entire 650MBs took around 7hrs. A fine way to spend my weekend.

What annoys me most is that they seemed prepared to let me discover their mess on my own. No email was sent nor was my hosted server status changed to inform me if the issue. I'll be calling the customer services department on Monday to have a shout at someone and see what they can offer me for my inconvenience. If nothing, then I'll be voting with my feet. Grrrr.

posted by smifterbifter at 10/30/2006 10:16:00 AM

2 Comments:

Suzie said at 1:22 PM: Rant rant rant - poor you :-(
smifterbifter said at 3:52 PM: I evan rang them up and ranted to them on the phone. They were decidely uninterested. Time to vote with my feet methinks.