Hostnine warning - They've now lost two of my sites and offer no support

Sonny Forelli

Sonny Forelli

Well-known member
May 8, 2008
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Liberty City
Hostnine Review Warning - They've now lost two of my sites and offer no support

I'm not one to usually jump online slamming companies - however I wanted to give you all fair warning as I know many people start out on shitty shared hosting.

I've had a Hostnine reseller account for $19.99/month for years - which I basically use as a sandbox or place to dump stupid long tail SEO projects / tests/friend's sites/ etc.

I caution ANYONE looking at them or currently with them, as the following has now happened twice: they've somehow migrated the sites to new servers and LOST much/all of the content in doing so.

What's happened:

Hostnine went through some big migration earlier this year - I paid no attention as it was basically 'here's your new FTP info' - you don't need to do anything. Great. So ~30 sites get transferred to new servers. A few weeks later I check EPN results and see clicks totally dropped off for 1 phpbay site. Look at the site - wordpress install and all files in the root /html/ directory are gone, as is the DB.

Contact Hostnine: "oh- you must've done this- it's been too long to fix YOUR error we don't have a backup" (me: 'Care to explain how you managed to f this up in terms of what happened?) "Yeah, we can't help you"


Okay- whatever, I don't particularly care, didn't bother reuploading even from my backups as the thing did ~100/month.


Flash forward to two days ago: a simple static html site vanishes. I check the root domain and get a directory listing page. I then try and log in and realize the IP has changed.

Contact Hostnine with:

[from me]Hi,

My domain www.YYYYYYYYYYYYYY(dot)com appears to have been recently moved to a new IP (shown in the reseller interface). All the index and other files within the main /html directory appear to have not been migrated and are lost.

This is the 2nd time this has happened with Hostnine (the first was on XXXXXXXXXX(dot)net when you had your big migration ~9 months or so ago).

Do you have a recent backup and can you please help me restore this?

Any news on WHY this occurred? 11/10 ~9:30pm

<and get the following response:>

[from hostnine] "I am going to send this ticket to the Level 2 Support Department to find out why it was migrated and if we can get a backup for you." 11/10/ - 9:43pm

[from ME] "What's the status of this?" 11/11 12:25pm

<nothing from Hostnine>

[from ME] "Status?" 11/11 ~8:25pm

[from hostnine] "I see this account was never migrated and still exists on the same server in which it was created, on March 27th. I see the following delete notices via FTP for this account:" 11/11 8:50pm

<shows ftp logs of me going in on 11/11 and deleting a folder which was now visible from the root - which I did. Also the IP has magically changed <again>

[from ME] "So any clue where all my index files magically vanished to?

I deleted the ABC123 directory yesterday after discovering for some
reason the site's index and a couple other home directory files were gone and this was now public facing.

Please have someone call me tomorrow and get a backup restored- this is
completely unacceptable and the support response is even more alarming.

Thank you," 11/11 8:55pm

[from Hostnine] "Greetings,

I see the backups were refreshed after the files were removed, thus the files were also removed from the backup servers. If you want to upload a backup of your own we can restore that for you." 11/11 10:02pm

[from ME] "can you explain WHY this occrurred?" 11/11 ~10:10pm

<SILENCE>

Now- I don't give two shits, but for someone starting out having a site they're running traffic to in low volumes and trying to pay the rent get fubared by a company like Hostnine and then have such piss poor fucking support that in 48 hours they still don't have an answer nor a backup restored (yes- I have backups, this isn't the point) it's pretty unreal.

The fact that this seems to be commonplace for Hostnine is even worse.


Just cautioning anyone currently with them - they claim to have backups but they don't, and you won't even need to fuck up your sites yourself, Hostnine's idiot monkey staff will gladly do it for you.

Perhaps I'm spoiled by high dollar dedicated servers that I have managed hosting on where if I say jump the response is 'how high' and US based support picks up the phone SANS phone system hell in about 15 seconds (I called Hostnine twice but after 15+ min wait times hung up both times), but I've gotta believe Hostgator or others in the $20/month reseller type plans have actual support. Our of course the great things I hear on here about Subigo's service.

Anyway,

Consider yourselves warned.

Hide-Yo-Kids-Hide-Yo-Wife-Cause-HostNine-be-rapin-errrbody.jpg

 


And I just want to thank God that I make enough monies that I don't have to put up with the shared hosting bs anymore.

vps from liquid web and canadianwebhosting lets me sleep at night
 
Benji49 said:
And I just want to thank God that I make enough monies that I don't have to put up with the shared hosting bs anymore.

vps from liquid web and canadianwebhosting lets me sleep at night
Click to expand...

likewise- however at $1/month per extra static IP I'm not going to bother moving several dozen sites that make me no money over to dedicated boxes.

(and occasionally NON unique ips have nice advantages)
 
Thanks for the heads up. Going in to check all my shit right now.

I've been on with the same level reseller hosting as yours with Hostnine for about six months now and currently have ~50 sites spread across multiple servers. I don't host any "money" sites with them, but damn. There's just no time for piss poor support like that.
 
Sonny, with most shared hostings you are the only responsible for databases and files back up.
I had something similar years ago with Dre@mhost when they moved to new servers but they were so nice to help me to get back MySql data.
 
Flash4Ever said:
Sonny, with most shared hostings you are the only responsible for databases and files back up.
I had something similar years ago with Dre@mhost when they moved to new servers but they were so nice to help me to get back MySql data.
Click to expand...

yeah that's fair- but IMO when their direct actions not any of mine take out one of my sites I question their ability to run their business.

Maybe Subigo who I respect on here can chime in - IMO while I understand I bear the responsibility (and again DO NOT CARE) I'm shocked that somehow this experience of "oh lulz - your files IZ gone!11" is unique in my experience to Hostnine

I've never experienced this in a decade with shitty cheap hosting solutions (or expensive cheap ones) when hosting was actually expensive.

I've had the "oh snap - the server blew up" - but not just the "yeah- we're not gonna respond to you for 24 hours and once we do we'll just pretend none of this is our fault"

THAT is wild. But go Hostnine, way to run a business.
 
Last edited:
Sonny Forelli said:
Maybe Subigo who I respect on here can chime in - IMO while I understand I bear the responsibility (and again DO NOT CARE) I'm shocked that somehow this experience of "oh lulz - your files IZ gone!11" is unique in my experience to Hostnine
Click to expand...

I don't know anything about Hostnine at all or how they run their business. But I do know that reseller accounts are always a bad idea. A reseller server is always going to be more oversold/overloaded than a shared server... So for anyone reading this who may be looking at a reseller account, don't do it, you can get a VPS for the same price or cheaper.

As for Hostnine losing your data, it was probably a retarded tech who deleted files on the wrong account. And as you're well aware, you can never trust your host to backup files for you. I personally know multiple owners of hosting companies who advertise that they backup accounts and they do not. It'll be fun to see what kind of excuses they come up with when one of their servers crash... anyway. (Also keep in mind that there's a difference between offsite backups and just backing up to the same server. I know a lot of hosts who make nightly backups, but they are made to the same server and only used when a client fucks something up and needs to be restored).

I don't even know what my point is here... How about this, never trust your host, any host. Always backup your own data and be prepared to move hosts at a moment's notice. The only people who ever get 100% screwed by a hosting company are the people who don't have their own backups.
 
Makes sense... going along with "be prepared to switch hosts at a moments notice" part, is there a particular way to manage local backups (longterm) that can be deployed on a variety of server configs quickly?

I'm asking because I went from cpanel>direct admin> and now back to cpanel with a batch of sites I didn't have a local backup of... what a fucking bitch this is, and it would be MUCH easier if I had all sites backed up from the original server.

subigo said:
I don't know anything about Hostnine at all or how they run their business. But I do know that reseller accounts are always a bad idea. A reseller server is always going to be more oversold/overloaded than a shared server... So for anyone reading this who may be looking at a reseller account, don't do it, you can get a VPS for the same price or cheaper.

As for Hostnine losing your data, it was probably a retarded tech who deleted files on the wrong account. And as you're well aware, you can never trust your host to backup files for you. I personally know multiple owners of hosting companies who advertise that they backup accounts and they do not. It'll be fun to see what kind of excuses they come up with when one of their servers crash... anyway. (Also keep in mind that there's a difference between offsite backups and just backing up to the same server. I know a lot of hosts who make nightly backups, but they are made to the same server and only used when a client fucks something up and needs to be restored).

I don't even know what my point is here... How about this, never trust your host, any host. Always backup your own data and be prepared to move hosts at a moment's notice. The only people who ever get 100% screwed by a hosting company are the people who don't have their own backups.
Click to expand...
 
I made the mistake of trying hostnine a long time ago.

Nothing but problems, and shitty customer service.
 
You guys who are so happy with HostGator, good luck, they screwed me. Long story, but basically they moved my site to what they called a "temporary" server which did not relay SMTP traffic, support didn't know it and couldn't figure out why email stopped working, bunch of clowns tried different things and said it was fixed when it wasn't, after almost a week I had to flee to another hosting service. A week later one of the owners emailed me apologizing for the circus. I'll never go back to them.
 
Cheap hosting usually are great for a few years before they realize their prices are not sustainable. Just switched from HostPC to HawkHost this year because of a similar experience to yours OP.
 
matt3 said:
Makes sense... going along with "be prepared to switch hosts at a moments notice" part, is there a particular way to manage local backups (longterm) that can be deployed on a variety of server configs quickly?

I'm asking because I went from cpanel>direct admin> and now back to cpanel with a batch of sites I didn't have a local backup of... what a fucking bitch this is, and it would be MUCH easier if I had all sites backed up from the original server.
Click to expand...

Control panel backups are only going to be restorable to the same kind of control panel (cpanel to cpanel, directadmin to directadmin, etc). Just because each panel is going to be using a different path setup for domains. Those control panel backup scripts are just zipping up your home folder and taking database dumps.

The best thing to do is just download everything that's in your public_html folder to your hard drive and zip it up (and take database dumps if needed). Then you can just upload and unzip the file to the new server yourself (and use phpmyadmin or whatever is available to restore databases). Doing it this way means it doesn't matter what your control panel is... a public_html folder on cpanel is a public_html folder on directadmin.

If you don't like doing things manually, I think PHP, Javascript, ASP.NET and Java - CodeCanyon has a few backup scripts available for a few bucks that would work on any linux server. Here's a few:

Simple Backup - PHP Scripts - CodeCanyon
Ultimate PHP Site Backup v2.0 - PHP Scripts - CodeCanyon
Advanced Backup System - PHP Scripts - CodeCanyon
 
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