22/09/2026
A parable of bad hosting
I have spent the last few days in turmoil. Basically I have been working on a website that is about 16 years old. Many people over the years that have added to it, improved it and probably broken it.
So it's my task to revamp the entire website to reflect new branding and a name change. We are talking 100+pages. So we used a recommended plugin to help us and everything seemed to be going ok.
But looked at the live site. it was gone. Broken.
Normally I could go into the backend and restore a recent backup. but I couldn't even do that. So I spoke to the hosting provider. It was a popular one and I thought this would be a doddle and sorted out quickly.
It really wasn't. The customer service operative was nice enough, But this took more than one call to get it restored and it took a few hours.
Into Day 2. and there was a home page, but it looked nothing like the actual website. So I asked what went wrong and this was apparently the best they could do. We couldn't even access the back end.
But I had an idea, if I could access the back end of the website I could access the last backup and restore it that way. That had potential: So back end was granted(?) and I started to restore the backup.
So far so good. But then it started chucking out errors, I had to reset the connection, had to log back in again and then it stopped.
I asked the support staff what had happened, This was apparently a well known problem and they will get their "admin team" to resolve the issue.
My next thought, I can manually install the database and upload all the necessary files from the server backups. Not my first rodeo so here goes.
All went well with saving the staging site. so did the same for the live website: Accessed all the files. Went to locate the database for the actual website. They were all gone.
Cue another chat with support and cue another ticket to the admin team.
Day 3. Still no answers, just lots of reassurance that the matter was being looked into. I could still locate files on the server. So I contacted my hosting company and asked if they could work with a backup file.
They said they'd look. So I create the account, upload the entire backup folder, sent a migrate request and waited. I got a reply within an hour.
The same evening, they had restored the website pretty much to how it was. There were flaws but these were easy for an old-timer.
The website is now live and we're now installing the staged site.
The "Admin team" from the other provider still hasn't come back. They've lost a client.
There are many hosting companies out there: Some good, bad and downright dodgy. Don't go for what you think is a good deal. Ask for recommendations, read reviews & read up on their technical support: Do you get a response in a couple of hours? Days? Weeks?
I relive this experience so you don't have to. If you need help or advice with your website or hosting provider, contact me today.
