If you’re a frequent visitor to Swift World you would realize that the site was down for practically the whole of last week (actually even more, roughly 11 – 12 days?). Now there is a reason to explain this and it is rather simple. There was a loophole within the control panel software that my host used. Someone had exploited this vulnerability and wiped every single thing on my host. My whole site and VPS account was wiped as well. It took about 90 hours before my VPS was reinstated.
90 hours translate to roughly 4 full days. Technically I could have gotten my site back up within the fifth day but spending most of my time serving the army, I couldn’t get a hold of my computer till the weekends. If I remembered correctly the host went down on a Tuesday and my VPS was only reinstated on Saturday. Hoping to have my data recovered, I requested for recovery a day after my site went down (apparently the host promised scheduled backups). The staff gave me hope and that all I needed was to wait. Poked them further when my VPS was freshly created and again they gave me hope, telling me that I needed to give them time. It was only until late Sunday (when I’m already back in camp) that they told me my backup was not available. Seriously?
Now I could’ve rebuilt the VPS myself but (blame me, shout at me, I’m foolish) the only backup that I have is about 2 months old. In addition, the staff gave me hope that they had backups ready and that it was only a matter of time before they recover it. It was a hopeless situation. I had no resources to do anything in camp. That explains why the website is only back up yesterday when I had the chance to use my computer at home.
I really disliked how the host handled the situation. It wasn’t so much that the server was down that really gotten on my nerves. Yes, perhaps they have a huge customer base and since they’re offering at such low prices they have to cut cost and thus are severely understaffed. Perhaps that is why it took them a long time to rebuild the nodes and servers. Fine, I pay less so I get less support. What really made me mad though, was how they couldn’t just tell me from the get go that my backup was not available. They told me to wait, and so I waited; waited only to find out that they did not have backups for my container.
I’ve moved on. I’m currently using a similarly priced (slightly more expensive but still considerably very cheap for the specs I get) plan from another host that have a rather positive reputation. I’ll do a review in a while for both the host that I’ve just moved from and the host I’ve moved to. For now, everything is back up and I’m glad that all the problems are more or less solved.
I do still have the previous VPS till March next year (yearly subscription). I’ll probably use it for my videos and testing out random stuff. Man what a week. I’ll be sure to start a more frequent scheduled backup on my own this time.
Anyways, hopefully everything is back to normal. If there is any problems or bugs within the site, do contact me and let me know.
[photo by Ciprian Popescu via flickr]
