Major incident at WHC.ca regarding hosting (2.Viewing)

DomainRecap said:

And guys, I apologize if I'm being blunt here, but I am a WHC customer and I was right there on the front lines experiencing it.

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I feel your pain and am for sure not arguing with you.

All I am saying is I purposely seek out a host that has cPanel because they have super easy tools to allow you to backup and fully restore.

In a perfect world the Webhost does as expected but because I have run into a very similar issue with Lunarpages way on back I have since never relied on the webhost. For my system ideally we have a webhost backup, my local backup, and my cloud backup. Between the 3 I should never be caught in the rain.

So all I am saying is it's better to have 3 backup systems than 1 to assure redundancy.

I remember Lunarpages told me I had all the tools with cPanel, why did I not use them. They were absolutely right, I relied on them and they failed. After that I never again relied on a host. Sure I was glad they did backups but a part of me knew I could never be 100% reliant on that. That is where cPanel backup comes in. Simply backup the entire account, now you can upload the file to any cPanel host and be running as soon as propogation allows.

DomainRecap said:

f any commercial host that allows this kind of access.

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DomainRecap said:

Sure, if you run your own server you can have direct access to the backup generation tools and process, as well as testing each and every backup in a development environment, but I don't know of any commercial host that allows this kind of access.

With companies like WHC, you download the Jet backup file and trust them that it's not corrupted or otherwise unusable.

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Always get hosting with SSH access. You can use tar and rsync to copy backups off to another server, and if transfers get interrupted, rsync can pick up where it left off rather than starting from the beginning again - ensuring backups are not corrupted during transfer.

I do have a couple of my own dedicated servers, and I back one up to the other - and vice versa, all done automatically using cron, tar, mysqldump and rsync.

As stated, I am certain these were not corrupted via transfer, but at the source.

There were problems at WHC before the official meltdown, which just exacerbated the damage.

DomainRecap said:

As stated, I am certain these were not corrupted via transfer, but at the source.

There were problems at WHC before the official meltdown, which just exacerbated the damage.

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Just saying that network issues can cause transfers to crap out. But yeah, if the source is corrupted, you're kinda screwed from the start. You'd think there'd be error checking on backups though.

I'm just glad I've always handled my own backups as back in the early days I had multiple issues where I needed them due to hackers and overzealous colo facilities that shut down servers. I had hackers inject malicious code into some of my sites and the colo company simply pulled the plugs (literally) due to Terms of Service violations (which of course weren't even done by me, but by the hackers using my servers to send out spam, and they wouldn't even let me appeal or anything). Luckily I had a friend living in the city where my server was and had to have him drive to the facility, pick up my server and mail it to me from the U.S.

In any case, you are 100% right and there's no doubt who is _really_ to blame here, but there's a reality to it too, and the only thing I can think to say is to remember the saying "fool me once..."