I have held a reseller account with Dot5Hosting for over a year and things were fine until recently when suddenly they decided to migrate all my files and accounts to a new server without warning.

But not everything was transferred. TWO very important MySQL databases are missing - one of them over 140mb in size containing records dating back 4 years. I asked the Dot5Hosting support team where they are and they say they have no idea. Naturally I am furious. This isn't all - when transferring all the files from the old server to the new one they didn't even set all the sub-domains I had before. Plus the passwords had been changed and they didn't even inform me of the new URL I would need to use in order to access the Site Admin page. Is Dot5Hosting liable at all for all these things they have done? Do I have grounds to sue?



Here is the transcript from the chat session I had this morning:



Please wait for a site operator to respond.
You are now chatting with 'Tech'
Tech: Welcome to Dot5hosting! How can I help you?
you: Hi Tech! Yesterday I asked you to find my two MySQL databases - "(database name removed)" and "(database name removed)". Did you find them?
Tech: Please forward me your domain name ...
you: (domain name removed)
Tech: I am checking it
you: Okay.
Tech: I am not able to locate the databases
you: What happened to them? They were on the the old servers. You moved the files to the new server - where are they?
you: Hello?
Tech: Let me double check it
you: Okay.
Tech: Sir I apologize for that but I am not able to locate it on the server
you: Those two databases are VERY important. You MUST find them. Don't tell me you have lost them - that is unacceptable.
you: Have you looked on the old server? Things don't just disappear on their own.
you: And you should have back-ups.
Tech: Sir, We do not have backups
you: Then WHERE are the databases? You moved everything without warning - it is your responsibility. Where are they?
you: I demand an explanation.
Tech: I will investigate it an get back to you
you: Fine but I expect you to find those files or will look into seeking legal action against your company. Those two databases are extremely important for my work and clients. Your company has been hugely irresponsible in migrating files without warning and improperly setting up the new accounts on the new server.

http://www.dot5hosting.com/aup.php

Dot5Hosting will not be held responsible for any loss of data held on our servers to anyone's website. Dot5Hosting will always try to restore your lost data, however this doesn't always work as the data may be corrupted. In such an instance, Dot5Hosting will not be held responsible. The Dot5Hosting servers are set to backup all web files and emails to another server once a week. Customers of Dot5Hosting are encouraged to keep a back up of their website

Make of that what you will

Rus

newmed: if you databases are so importnat you should keep yourself a backup, as you can never trust someone else, even they do backups daily.

I agree that is hell, if they start migrating without notice you and then even lose your data, heh. It happended to me too, but somewhere else.

Moral of the story is, if you have important databases, back them up yourself, daily, and then have multiple copies of those backups.

Originally posted by Aussie Bob
Moral of the story is, if you have important databases, back them up yourself, daily, and then have multiple copies of those backups.

That's absolutley correct. We have backups made daily, but we always encourage our clients to perform backups themselves, especially if it is important to them.

As I can completely understand your point of view (they should have given you notice, responsible for finding the databases), I certainly do hope you find a resolve for this (if any at all).

newmed, if those databases were that important to you. You should have made some sort of attempt to do nightly backups by downloading them via control panel. Something always go wrong and data is the MOST important part of your company's foundation. There should be several backup plans in case one fails.

Unfortunately making back-ups of the databases were not easy. Since one of the DB was over 135Mb in size the server would keep timing out whenever I tried to download it via MyPHPAdmin or other tools. I contacted the support team about this over a year ago and they made some changes to the server and then asked me to try downloading it but the same problem occurred - the server would time out.

Then it was suggested by them that I should download the DBs via SSH using a program called "Putty" and they gave me the command lines but most of the time the commands were incorrect. I persistently asked them to give me the correct commands but it never worked. I would keep getting error messages.