July 27, 2021 @ 12:00 pm, by raindog308
A user on LowEndTalk reported that shared hosting provider SmallWeb has emailed customers to report that their London shared hosting has suffered a “catastrophic data loss”.
“Dear friend,
At 6:03PM UK time on 25th July 2021 I received an email stating that the server and licenses for London were suspended.
Shortly after, I was alerted that the service was infact terminated in error by the infrastructure provider’s WHMCS installation as opposed to being suspended.
Because of this, I am sorry to tell you that catastrophic data loss has occurred in London. With the server terminated, no live data remains.”
They are still undertaking emergency measures to attempt to restore service and backups.
SmallWeb also suffered a serious issue in January 2020 in their Los Angeles location which required the immediate closure of the site.
This news highlights the need for users to always have their own backups and not rely on a provider’s backups.
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raindog308
I'm Andrew, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Moderator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, shell scripting, and relational database systems. I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their VPSes.
This is the second time smallewb had such an event where they failed to ensure working backup, they didn’t learn anything from his LAX1 fiasco.