It Never Hurts Being Too Careful

So apparently, my well functioning host had some problems that I didn’t know about. I was with Qoozz for 28 months (that’s right, over two years of excellent service), but a few weeks ago, I stumbled on a thread about a month old over at WebHostingTalk. Pretty much, there was a harddrive crash at Qoozz, it wasn’t recoverable, and Leslie, the owner, wasn’t responding at all for over a month. What was funny though was that the server I was on wasn’t affected or at least I didn’t notice any downtimes or any loss of data. Which was good!

However, still feeling a bit insecure after this unexpected (as if hardwares will give you a notice before failing) disaster, I decided to submit a ticket to just see if Leslie was there. Nope. There was a database error with the support desk and there was just no way of submitting a ticket. So, I decided to check what was up on their forums. Again a database error was the only thing that showed up. Hmm… No support?

Pretty much, instantly, I checked over the offers at WHT and picked myself a new host with a real 24/7 support and a company history of over 5 years. It wasn’t an easy move because being at one place for 28 months, even if you don’t know anyone there other than this one owner, you sort of grow into that place. But sometimes you just need to get practical. Of course, I wasn’t emotional over a tiny hosting account there, but it is just that it felt weird.

Anyways, what am I trying to say? It honestly never hurts to be too careful. Now, although this blog is not a big blog, I have quite a few sites, which I won’t disclose, that do pretty well. A data loss would have a critical hit on the websites. Personally, I don’t have a good backing up habit (the last backup is from November 2008) so for sure a data loss would have affected by revenue, traffic, and potentially even the reputation of the sites.

I wasn’t going to risk any of that after having to go through all that work trying to get these sites where they are now. Anyways, that was my primary reason for a switch. Some of you may have noticed a downtime, although I don’t think there should have been any as I moved the site’s files over before changing the domain’s nameservers.

I’m really glad that I was able to dodge a potential disaster.

Do any of you have any bad stories with hosts? Any stories of backing up? Any stories of you barely dodging what could have been a major tragedy? Well, comment away! Oh yeah, and before you go commenting, please make a backup of your site.