Why you should always backup up cloud data

Looking back I probably ought to have seen the warning signs, things that indicated Weycrest were not the gold standard of webhosting. There were some problems with their own website and when I tried to contact them to ask them a question about WordPress they didn’t answer me.

Still I needed a cheap webhost for my new blog, and they seemed very reasonable, so I signed up and started my blog.

Now the thing I really kick myself about was that a week or so after signing up and uploading my blog there was a major outage of my site and it was impossible to get hold of Weycrest, numerous phone calls and emails went unanswered. This irritated me. Not the outage, as I reasoned you get what you pay for, and in electing for cheap I realised there might be some issues. No I was annoyed they didn’t respond to any of my queries.

Now at this stage I should have moved, or at the very least started carefully

How I felt about my actions.

backing up my files. Alas like an internet greenhorn prized eejit I did neither and carried on.

Well the “inevitable” happened and at the end of may Weycrest went bust. It seems that the geezer running the company wiped all the servers, and suspended everyones accounts, before if the forums are to be believed fleeing the country.

Given my earlier stupidity in not backing up my data locally I despairingly realised that I had lost everything. Months and months of work on my blog. To say I was disconsolate is an understatement.

When searching the web for information or advice about what had gone on I stumbled upon the  forums of a company called Vidahost

Who actually had some real news on the fate of Weycrest. They were also making an offer to former Weycrest customers who wanted to come to them.

I decided Vidahost sounded good and spoke to a nice chap called Dominic from their Customer Service department on the blower who invited me to join them. Before I had even signed up or given them any money Dominic spent some time in a valiant (if fruitless) attempt to try and recover some of my data.

Anyhow I have now signed up and I cannot recommend these guys highly enough, very reasonable and excellent Customer Service. Assuming you are reading this then the site is up and running good as new!

I also am incredibly indebted to Google Cache, without which I would have been unable to resurrect as much of my content as I have. I know I have permanently lost a few of the blogs I had uploaded but I am mostly back.

So the moral of this story? Do a little bit of research before signing up to a budget host I now realise that even some cursory googling would have let me realise Weycrest were ones to avoid.

But most of all make backups, the last thing you want to happen is to lose all the hours, days and weeks you put into your site. A local backup shouldn’t take much time but it will save you a lot of agony and heart ache.  The truth is that “the cloud” may well be the future of online computing but for the time being you cannot beat double redundancy and local backups.

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15. June 2010 by Ralph Ferrett
Categories: Web and Technology | Tags: , , , , , | 5 comments

Comments (5)

  1. Nice to see its all back up. i normally take a look and have a good read.

  2. Ow ow ow ow OW!

    I feel your pain. Or some of it.

    Have you tried the Way Back Machine for the rest of what’s lost at http://www.archive.org/ ?

    I found things there which I thought I’d lost forever.

    Ben

  3. Well after having to rebuild my macbook last night I cannot say how important backing up is! Thankfully it all worked or I wouldn’t be able to rant about it at work any more lol

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