My Experience With Hostgator

First, let me start out by saying that I have been a Hostgator customer for about 5 years now. I have always been very impressed with their service and have never had a major issue (until now). I originally chose Hostgator because they were fairly cheap and offered 24/7 live support which is usually extremely helpful for any issue I run into. Like many other people on this forum I considered them the best and never thought about switching to a different provider.

However, all of that changed yesterday. I have a shared hosting plan with Hostgator where I host about 10 Wordpress blogs. Each of the blogs generate a significant amount of monthly revenue through adsense as well as link sales. Two day sago, on February 11th, 2012 I logged into the Wordpress admin panel of a couple of these blogs and everything seemed to be fine, the sites were loading properly and I wasn't having any issues with any of them. Yesterday, February 12th, 2012 I tried to login to one of the sites again. This time, I received a "404 Page Not Found" error. I quickly checked all my other sites and found the same 404 error for every single one. The only site that was working was my primary domain, all of my add-on sites showed a 404 error. I immediately contacted Hostgator via live chat for some answers.

The chat agent informed me that all of my websites (with the exception of my primary domain) had been deleted. He could not provide a reason or any sort of explanation for why this happened. I didn't want to waste any more time so I asked him if they would be able to restore one of their weekly backups to get my sites back up. He said yes but it would cost me $15. I submitted the backup restore request and minutes later received an email from a server admin stating that a rare server outage had prevented my backup from taking place. Therefore, he was unable to restore my sites and issued me a refund for the $15.

At this point I'm starting to get frustrated because I don't have any backups of my own and it appears as though everything has been permanently lost. I go back to the live chat and ask to speak with a supervisor. I ask the supervisor to give me a list of the IPs that have accessed my cpanel. Once he does, I track their location and ask him to give me the dates and times that each one accessed. Sure enough, the results show that I hadn't accessed my cpanel in over a week, but Hostgator had accessed it several times (including the night all my websites were mysteriously deleted). The supervisor confirms that all the website files are gone and that it appears Hostgator was likely responsible. All he is able to do is offer his "sincerest apologies" while my inbox is getting flooded with people asking why the sites displaying the links they paid for are down. He blames me for not having my own backups of the sites and explains that Hostgator's weekly backups are not guaranteed. I understand that having my own backups would have fixed the issue, but with a hosting provider as reliable as Hostgator I never would've expected all my sites to get deleted overnight for no reason at all.

Today I have no choice but to begin the rebuilding the sites. I have lost all the hundreds of posts written on each site and will have to refund payments for many of my link sales.

Throughout the whole ordeal I have spoken to 2 live chat agents, 1 supervisor, and 3 Linux server administrators. All have confirmed that a mistake was made on the behalf of Hostgator and all have apologized several times. They are still unable to provide me with any type of explanation and refuse to even give me a bill credit in an attempt to remedy the situation.

 

You absolutely must keep your own backups regardless of whether your host makes them or not. Consider an expensive, but very important lesson learned.

Why won't they give you a refund? That makes absolutely no sense. They should absolutely credit your bill/give you a refund, so you can get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. How do entire accounts just mysteriously get deleted? Scary stuff.

 

I know I should keep my own. But I've had a few times in the past where I messed something up on a site and Hostgator was able to restore it with their weekly backup. I guess I just thought if I ever needed it, it would be there.

I've been back and forth with them all day. Supposedly they're still "investigating" what went wrong but they have assured me there is absolutely zero chance of me ever getting those sites back. I've asked for a bill credit several times and they just keep dancing around it.

 

I am using a different host but that once happened to me as well. All my add-on domain's files were deleted but luckily database was safe and I installed wordpress again. Was your database also deleted? This really sucks. All those hard work on creating blog and post went all in vain.

 

I think I still have the databases. It'll just take me some time to sort through them all and recreate the blogs. It's really just a big hassle and was very unexpected. Hopefully I'll get it all sorted out though.

 

always good to keep backups all over the place

 

Is your total file size over 20 GB? Hostgator's auto backup in shared hosting does not work if you exceed 20 GB

 

Backup is the basis of any successful IT business.

 

Agree backups are possibly the most important thing a webmaster must have.

 

Well if you have database backups, there is still a hope.

But you know that anything can happen to anyone, hostgator is no doubt a good provider, but problems can definitely happen.

You should try to install and put your sites back online using databases and see if it work fine.

good luck.

 

You can send an email to mentioning everything and ask for a Compensation. He is the one, who can helps you about this.

 

Scary stuff indeed..ot's not always simple to make backups of your sites..more when you have like dozens of them.
Sorry for your data loss, i know how precious posts are on websites that depend on Adsense.

 

This is an incredible story, we must all be more vigilant about creating our backups I guess, me as well. Something I will be on the lookout for on my HostGator account.

 

10 Wordpress Blogs in one sharing account. I think hostgator has inodes system and if they are more than 1 lac, backups are not provided. 10 wordpress blogs will surely have more than 1 lac inodes.

 

I also faced this problem but luckily I faced it much earlier so loss was not much. There were only 350 pages on my 2 websites which I recreated in 3 days and 3 nights.

 

karma will get you congrats

 

I actually wasn't over the inode limit. Hostgator even said that my account should have been backed up but somehow wasn't. It all worked out in the end though, even though all the site files were gone, the databases were all still there. All I had to do was re-upload the theme files and import the old databases. Everything's back to normal now but I will definitely be making my own backups from now on. I would encourage others to do the same!

 

Dude try google 'cached'. Google your domain names like site:yourdomain.com and then click "cached" for each result. You might be able to get your articles back. Even the way back machine or domain tools "screenshots from history" should bring it up. Regards.

Edit: Oh okay I see you solved it

 

Hi Stephen,

This is awful. I'm sorry for you! In such situation everyone needs support. I'm not dissing your web host, not just because they aren't shameless overseller, they are for sure. You had to keep a back up on your account for sure. You have even had to set up your own VPS instead of hosting your website on Shared Hosting account. Let's say what comes to my mind.

1. Go check what was indexed from Google and try to restore the content from cached pages. The first thing to do is to restore the domains and websites somewhere,s so you'd minimize loses.
2. Upload your recent articles (posts) and then start uploading the old ones one by one
3. Try to find what would be found in Archive.org

Go ask the web host you mentioned to prove an older copy of your back-ups. It would be 2 or 3 weeks or even one month old copy. If they do not have the most recent one, the must have and older one! Focus on restoring website first however!

 

Hostgator web hosting is the best hosting service, i fully recommend them.