When I first started hosting with Spunky everything went smooth as silk (as you can see by this thread: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=670800) and it was almost like a dream host, unfortunately it didn’t take long before the bubble burst with my site being down due to some DNS issue on their side which resulted in my site being down around 4 times… Mike offered to make it up to me by giving me a free month.


After a couple of other minor issues things were finally starting to look good when suddenly my site was offline again, I contacted support and they told me that they had changed the name servers and had sent emails out regarding this around 3 weeks back.. I never got these emails (but I did get billing emails), none the less I changed my name servers to the new ones… and that’s when I got a shock, after my domain again resolved… its showed me copy of my site that was nearly a month or so old! All my content was gone! Apparently they had also sent other emails (which I didn’t get) saying that once they shift name servers all the old sites would be deleted! In the beginning when I started hosting with Mike I asked him if Spunky did daily backups and was old yes, so I never kept a backup… and so I lost my whole site… weeks of work including writing multipage articles, test scripts, modifications etc.. all gone, like they never existed… except for some found on google’s cache.


Worst of all, all the links that I had from other sites to specific articles are now dead and even if I rebuild the site those links are still going to be dead because I don’t know all of the old links.
Now, reading this post you might say: “ Ah! He’s just bitter” and you would be damn right, I am bitter, angry, frustrated and a whole lot of other things as this could have been prevented from their side if they used a simple system that I thought of in 2 minutes..


Just like the link that you have to click on when you join a newsletter or a forum they could have sent out these notifications with a link having the customers number attached to it to show that the client had gotten the email.. if the link was clicked… they client got the email, if not, a simple cron job to check and resend emails that were not received would do the trick, if that too didn’t work… then maybe contact from tech/customer service *BEFORE* deleting someone’s website/s?


Spunky says they are very sorry and regret what has happened, but sorry and regret does not get back the weeks of work that went into a site, does it?

(Edit: Mike did offer me another month of free hosting... but now that I dont have a site... what will I do with that that one month of hosting?)

Ryan,
I've spent a lot of time trying to work this out with you and you seem to fully ignore that in this post. You word it almost as if we pushed you aside and tried to not solve a thing. I even tried going to the datacenter in hopes of recovering data for you.

We sent out 3 emails, one to inform our users that there would be an upcoming server migration, one saying okay, please update your nameservers then I personally email you the day the old server was going offline to let you know that you still haven't updated your nameservers. I even provided you a screenshot of the WHMCS email log to show you why, from our side, we had no reason to believe that you weren't contacted.

then maybe contact from tech/customer service *BEFORE* deleting someone’s website/s?

We never deleted your website and I'm not sure how you could come to that conclusion. When we migrated, we copied the data how it was on the original server. Since your nameservers weren't updated when the migration first occurred, all traffic and updates still were sent to the old server. When that server went offline and you updated your nameservers, it showed the data that we had moved back with the original migration happened.

We kept the old server online for 3 additional weeks after the move to take care of any updating needed or incase a transfer didn't transfer right. When you asked me if we do daily backups, we do indeed do them. However, once the server goes down, we don't have access to the backups made on that old server (even though I tried to regain access). In our TOS, we state very clearly that you can't rely only on our backups, especially when your data is critical.

You bring up other ways of handling things in the future. We've done server migrations in the past and up until now we've never had an issue, Now that there has been one issue with it, we will of course try to figure out a better system for the future. But again, since it had worked flawlessly in the past, we would have never foreseen an issue this time around.

For anyone else reading this, I can't stress enough how important it is to keep local backups of your website. We obviously don't want you to loose data, but when unfortunate events like these occur, it doesn't leave you out in the dark.

Mike

Mike,

I am sorry if I ignored that in my first post, it was not intentional,
Let me clear this up... after Spunky found out what had happened they did spend more than a day via trouble tickets back and fourth... plus its worth mentioning that from the beginning Mike/support was very polite and pretty quick, even when I was frustrated never did support lose their temper or be impolite, they always apologized for problems from their end.Even after I declined Mikes offer of another month of free hosting and told him to delete my account as I dont have a website anymore... still Spunky/Mike/Support were very cordial/polite/professional.
Mike, I hope the above more than clears up any miscommunication in my first post.

Its also true that Mike sent me a screen shot of emails that went out, but the fact is I never got any of these emails (as I showed Mike in a screenshot of my inbox, not that he accused me of lying or anything(just to clear that up too))... but all I am saying is; there should have been "safety nets" in place to make sure things were as close to 100% as possible smooth, before deleting a website, because now that its gone...

/Ryan

To add insult to injury, I have just now gotten a "First Invoice Oberdue Notice" from Spunky, can you kindly take care of this?

Ryan,
I have taken care of it and you will no longer receive any emails from us.

Mike

Mike,

Got another one: Second Invoice Overdue Notice

Dear xxx,
This is the second billing notice that your invoice no. 423 which was generated on 04/07/2008 is now overdue.
Your payment method is: xxx
....



Please disable these notices as I already get far too much email that I dont need/want.



Thanks,
Ryan

I'm sorry to hear about your problems.
Not to take any sides in this matter, but this just shows the importance of always taking your own backups, no matter what. You never know when somethign goes wrong, and it's always in your best interest to keep your own backups just in case something like this happens.

In any case, I do hope you'll be able to sort out the issues.

Not to take any sides in this matter, but this just shows the importance of always taking your own backups, no matter what.

:agree:

ScarabWeb speaks the truth.

You never know when a fireball sent down from Jesus himself will completely destroy your web hosting companies data center.

Create backups of all of your stuff, every time you update.
Keep these backups saved on your local machine.

TS could be bittered, but its 100% his fault. No backups, not read the TOS and not updated the name servers. You might lose one email, but not three. And if all things are setup correctly, you could always read a copy of any outgoing mail in their billing system. That is done against situations like these: customers making errors and blaming hosts.

goes back to the saying if your paying $2.99/month dont expect the world. :D

We had similar issue 2 months back when we had to upgrade one P4 server into Dual Opteron. We took extra measures for data protection and kept old server online for 15 days then just before taking it down we dumped full server backup and uploaded it into our backup server.

After 15 days when we took down old server, few clients who were not using our name servers complained about down server/website and then it turned to be about 15 days old data, fortunately we had our backup ready to restore latest data :D.

It is always better to take extra cautions with data.

I'm sorry to hear about these problems you've been experiancing. It's all too common in IT that data is lost. It's something we all know about, but few of us do anything about it.

Perhaps it might be a good idea to get a host that offers backuping as part of the deal, perferably for free.

I hope your new host provides a better service than your old one did.

Playing Devil's Advocate again...I rule in favour of the ever studying Mike.

It's unfortunate that this has happened to you mag1c1an, but what can I say....no backups...failing to update nameserver info.

If it's any consolation...at least you'll remember to act on it the next time.

Many folks have made the same mistakes and learned from it.

OWM

Perhaps it might be a good idea to get a host that offers backuping as part of the deal, perferably for free.
We do offer backups, for free. As I stated it wasn't a matter of us now having backups, it was that the request came for it to be restored after the old server went offline (and since he hadn't updated his nameservers, all new content was on that old server). The point that we are saying is that although we offer these, we don't want users to solely rely on them. Circumstances like these could be avoided if a user keep their own backup. From the few times that I talked with Ryan, he seems like a great guy and this is obviously not something we wanted to happen to him.

ever studying Mike.
Thats the truth! :rolleyes:

Mike,

Got another one: Second Invoice Overdue Notice

Dear xxx,
This is the second billing notice that your invoice no. 423 which was generated on 04/07/2008 is now overdue.
Your payment method is: xxx
....



Please disable these notices as I already get far too much email that I dont need/want.



Thanks,
Ryan



Sorry but had to totally post this :
:rofl:
:rofl:
:rofl:
:rofl:

Just was hillarious seeing that reply after mike fixed the issue. :blush:

It might have been cause they did not cancel your account or u are on some of their other email list ?

Good luck in sorting your site out !

Cheers

Sorry but had to totally post this :





Just was hillarious seeing that reply after mike fixed the issue.

It might have been cause they did not cancel your account or u are on some of their other email list ?

Good luck in sorting your site out !


Yeah that was rather odd. The account was canceled and the invoice marked cancelled yet it still decided to send it out. Thats technology for ya!

Yeah that was rather odd. The account was canceled and the invoice marked cancelled yet it still decided to send it out. Thats technology for ya!

Let me guess whmcs system i have had bad experience with companies using that system !