I have used www.nomonthlyfees.com for almost 8 years. Because I've always maintained a personal website with them, I didn't have to have much interaction. However, about 4 years ago, they sent me an email that they had a server crash and lost everything. I needed to upload my files again. What? No backups? At the time, I remember thinking that if I was a business and was hosting with them, I would have been pretty upset. They also included a nice little blurb, stating that they were going to change some things to ensure data integrity and redundancy in the future.
As I got used to patrolling their site and how to do everything there, I decided to create a business website for myself about three years ago. It was a photography site and I worked countless hours on the design. I had several backend MySQL databases on the site, and because of the previous problem, I decided to keep backups myself too. Earlier this year, my home computer died and I lost my backup, but by this time, it had been over a year since I made any changes, so I wasn't too concerned about creating another backup, as this was my hosting company's job. And not mine. I was just doing it for safety's sake at the time. Surely, they would always have a backup copy that was within the last year! They're a hosting company, right?!!
WRONG! My website disappeared yesterday and I emailed support. They're support has always been very poor. They always eventually answer a question, but then always close your ticket, even when the issue is still open. Even when creating an emergency ticket, you always have to wait almost a full day for a reply. True to form, about 18 hours later, I received the following email (status closed):
"&
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL
GO TO THE ONLINE HELP DESK INSTEAD
http://www.mympc.com/hd/loginc.php
Ticket ID: [#49905]
Subject: [Site is down]
New Status: [Closed]
Hi Jeff,
The following is a time line of your support request. My most recent response is at the top. If you need to reply to me, please update the ticket at http://www.mympc.com/hd/loginc.php
Thanks,
Andrew
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# CUSTOMER SERVICE RESPONSE #
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[Tech: Andrew] 11/10 11:01 PM
;
On 10-30, the server 20061 primary hard drive failed. Within an hour, we replaced the hard drive with a brand new one. Two hours later, we began restoring accounts from our backup drive. But, several account backups, including yours was fully corrupted and contained no usable data. We are currently looking into how to avoid this in the future. We have reopened your account as a fresh install. Your FTP/Cpanel password is now the same as your billing password. You will need to reupload your site from your local backup, and recreate any email accounts, etc. Make sure, you clear your browser cache and reboot your computer before trying to access the site. It can take up to 4 hours for your local computer/isp/network to propagate. If you still cannot get to the site to ftp/control panel, you can temporarily use the ip address to ftp and access the control panel. FTP: [IP ADDRESS] CONTROL PANEL: http://[IP ADDRESS]: 2082/Thank you for your continued patience and understanding.
No Response Yet
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# End Customer Service Response #
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~ Your Original Request ~
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[Opened] 11/10 06:12 PM
Why is my site down?
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~ End Of Your Request ~
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As you see from the above email, they don't take the administration of their websites seriously at all. "We're looking into how to avoid this in the future." Serious?!! How long have you been a webhosting company? Over 10 years?! You don't know about RAID?! You don't know how to check your backups? You don't understand how archiving works?!! Equally frustrating, there was barely even the hint of being at all sorry in the email. It was basically an "oops. Sorry about that. Redo your website again please".
Absolutely ridiculous. Even more amazing is that over the last few years, I have purchased 8 different domain and websites from them. I'm paying them hundreds of dollars a year! So, I am now letting the yearly fee expire on each one and moving all my domains. What a pain. But obviously necessary.
For now. I'm off to back up a bunch of websites!
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