Do not use Hostway!

I wanted to put out a warning about an experience I am having with Hostway (a web hosting company). I set up a site a few years ago, and have paid them for hosting ever since (Hostway isn't a great company, but it's inconvenient to switch.)

Yesterday morning (Friday) they had a server outage, resulting in a number of customers' MySQL databases being deleted, including my own. They claim they are working on restoring from backup, but so far it's been about 36 hours. No ETA on when they will, and nobody at their customer service seems to know anything.

Things happen, but the worst part is they didn't tell any of the affected customers, and didn't even post a notice about it on their website. It looks like they're hoping that most customers won't notice and won't ask for refunds or get mad.

I have my own backups so my exposure is limited, but I wanted to put the word out. There's no excuse for not telling your customers when their databases go down for 36 hours.

It really boils down to how much data was lost and it's not an easy /fast process to recover it all. Granted them not telling people what was going on isn't good, but I wouldn't trash a company over it taking them a long time to restore your databases, you have to put in perspective what else was broken on their end

I stand by my criticism. People can make their own choices -- don't you think potential customers have the right to know about a company's record? How is somebody supposed to evaluate a host's reliability?

If they had been transparent about it, I wouldn't feel the need to let others know. But since they're not even telling the affected customers, I think I'm being helpful by posting this information.

And let's be honest, 36 hours of unacknowledged outage (if they will ever get the data back, which is unclear) is not something most people would tolerate. It is actually a big deal.

I'm simply explaining circumstances that people don't tend to understand when it comes to data recovery it's not instant and depending what all they lost it could take days to recover. And not once did I say anything about you posting this.

I understand that you are upset over the lack of communication but once again my post wasnt geared towards that

Fair enough

Hello,

If it's true you should ask them for compensation. 36 hours are too much.

Regards

Hope you can find another good hosting provider in the future.


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Regards



ASPHostPortal
"Do good things, and good things will come to you”

Thanks. For my high-load site I am going with Rackspace Cloud Sites in the future. For my low-load site, I am going to move it from Hostway to Blue Host or GoDaddy probably.

I hope that Godaddy was a joke

Sorry to hear about your troubles with them. It's really irritating if you are not getting any reply nor aware of what's going on. You have your backups, so I don't think you'll have any problem moving with another host, if your current host is not helpful.

And I do agree that GoDaddy is a great registrar, but I have read quite a lot of bad reviews about them. I don't have any experience with them, so really can't comment.

I have to agree with you that not informing customers of an outage that has lasted 36 hours is way too long especially when considering the possibility of lost data.

If you do move to the rackspace cloud do let us know how it goes. Thanks for the review.