Grrrrr. BH rant. Backups not allowed

[nitrocrzy]

Today, I received an email saying my site is deactivated due to site causing performance issues. I track my site's visitors and I actually get very little legitimate traffic. So long story short my site is taking up too much space. A quick call to support and they tell me backups are not allowed. Grrrrr, I'm on vacation in Vietnam and the last thing I want to mess with is fixing website issues. The funny thing is the only backups I have on the site is a gallery backup due to a reinstall and 1 site backup. I authorized support to delete the files deemed the problem. And once again, I'm wondering if I should be looking for a different provider.

[Early Out]

Was the "gallery backup" a part of your website? If not, the TOS are pretty clear about the fact that that's not permitted. You'll find pretty much the same language on other shared hosts.

And just out of curiosity, how big was that gallery backup? And how many individual files (roughly)?

Frankly, I'd rather see BH say that you can store, say, 100GB of stuff, and get rid of the "no backups" clause. On the other hand, you can get a pure backup service for $50 a year, including the software to take care of keeping things synchronized without any effort, so that's beginning to look like a better alternative.

[nitrocrzy]

Was the "gallery backup" a part of your website? If not, the TOS are pretty clear about the fact that that's not permitted. You'll find pretty much the same language on other shared hosts.

And just out of curiosity, how big was that gallery backup? And how many individual files (roughly)?

Frankly, I'd rather see BH say that you can store, say, 100GB of stuff, and get rid of the "no backups" clause. On the other hand, you can get a pure backup service for $50 a year, including the software to take care of keeping things synchronized without any effort, so that's beginning to look like a better alternative.

Thousands of 10mb pictures....
The gallery backup was only until verifying the new install.

My biggest problem is deactivating and giving me just 15 days to fix without any warnings.

[felgall]

You had a warning - it was in the TOS that you were supposed to read before you signed up.

[Early Out]

Well yeah, but I'm pretty sure that clause in the TOS is new - I don't think it was there when I signed up.

[nitrocrzy]

You had a warning - it was in the TOS that you were supposed to read before you signed up.

That's a nice response Felgall. It definitely was not in the TOS I signed on with. Deactivating a site without notice is a really shi**** action to take in my opinion.

[Abel1337]

Dont give BlueHost a bad name, they have been good to me for years now. I only recently joined their forums http://images.mydetaileddetail.com/img/653/h08z1005tebx/smile.gif

[felgall]

That's a nice response Felgall. It definitely was not in the TOS I signed on with. Deactivating a site without notice is a really shi**** action to take in my opinion.

As far as I can remember the following clauses were in the terms of service two years ago when I signed up (and were probably there long before that)


You agree that Bluehost may, under certain circumstances and without prior notice, immediately terminate your account and access to the Service.
While Bluehost.com will provide our clients with reasonable notification, Bluehost.com reserves the right to change its policy at any time to meet the needs of our customers, changing laws and new technology.


If something wasn't in the TOS when you signed up then those clauses indicate that they would have notified everyone when the change was made to the TOS that removed using it for backups from what is allowed but that they are not responsible if you didn't see the change (something rather standard for TOS anywhere). Also the change to Unlimited space would make a change to limit what the space can be used for essential since otherwise what would stop someone from deciding to store a backup copy of the whole internet in their unlimited space.

It is essential for anyone using a computer related service anywhere to remain aware of what the TOS say and to watch for changes - particularly where a change is made to the service (which is when a change to the TOS is most likely). There is noting unusual about BlueHost's action with this as any other computer company would do exactly the same if they changed their TOS and people didn't change their usage of the service to meet the new requirements.

[nitrocrzy]

As far as I can remember the following clauses were in the terms of service two years ago when I signed up (and were probably there long before that)


You agree that Bluehost may, under certain circumstances and without prior notice, immediately terminate your account and access to the Service.
While Bluehost.com will provide our clients with reasonable notification, Bluehost.com reserves the right to change its policy at any time to meet the needs of our customers, changing laws and new technology.


If something wasn't in the TOS when you signed up then those clauses indicate that they would have notified everyone when the change was made to the TOS that removed using it for backups from what is allowed but that they are not responsible if you didn't see the change (something rather standard for TOS anywhere). Also the change to Unlimited space would make a change to limit what the space can be used for essential since otherwise what would stop someone from deciding to store a backup copy of the whole internet in their unlimited space.

It is essential for anyone using a computer related service anywhere to remain aware of what the TOS say and to watch for changes - particularly where a change is made to the service (which is when a change to the TOS is most likely). There is noting unusual about BlueHost's action with this as any other computer company would do exactly the same if they changed their TOS and people didn't change their usage of the service to meet the new requirements.

Ok, .. Yes that clause might have been in there so I guess I can stop ranting about that....


But... the nightmare has only begun. I returned home and just now discovered they went beyond just deleting my backup files and went thru deleting all kinds of files. Most site related. They left stuff that should have been deleted but got rid of pic's and stuff I use for my forum as well as other site related stuff.

Warning.... if your site is huge... bluehost may just start deleting willy nilly.

They don't save backups of sites over 4GB so I can't recover that. I authorized them to delete only the offending files which were my backup files *.tar.gz.

Grrrrrrr....... I can't tell you how pissed off I am.

[felgall]

You should always keep a backup of everything that you put on your hosting account so that you can rebuild it if it ever becomes necessary. That's one reason why (regardless of what the ToS may say) that it is inappropriate to use it for storing backups. It is something to make backups of, not something to make backups to.

[Early Out]

I bit the bullet and signed up with Carbonite to keep my offsite backups. I still have an external USB drive that I use to back up all my stuff - I just run a little batch script using xxcopy to spin off everything in My Documents. I love xxcopy (http://www.xxcopy.com), by the way - it has all kinds of option switches to control how it behaves. I just let it keep a mirror on the external drive, adding new or changed files, and deleting files from the backups if they've been deleted from the hard drive.

But those backups would do me no good if the house caught fire, since the external drive is inches from the PC.

Carbonite has only a couple of annoying little habits, but it's mostly automatic and not obtrusive. It will also keep several versions of your files, which comes in handy once in a while.

The annoying habits? First, if you choose to have it show little green/yellow dots in Windows Explorer, to show you what has, or hasn't, been backed up, it sometimes refreshes the WE window at inopportune moments, like when you're trying to right-click on a file to rename it. But you can turn that feature off. Second, if you save a file twice within ten minutes, it won't back it up again for 24 hours. But you can override that by opening its little status window, and telling it to do the backups immediately.

[nitrocrzy]

You should always keep a backup of everything that you put on your hosting account so that you can rebuild it if it ever becomes necessary. That's one reason why (regardless of what the ToS may say) that it is inappropriate to use it for storing backups. It is something to make backups of, not something to make backups to.

Yes... that's very true... and I was keeping backups with cPanel before BH put limits on that. Then I had a cron tab executing a backup script before my cron mysteriously disappeared. I figured when I got back I would investigate a script with rsync... but I guess I waited to long.

Things happen in life.... my new laptop with all those files went belly up and the stupid HP has a proprietary drive chassis that doesn't allow me to pull the data off the thing. I thought I had a decent hosting service that reliably backed up site data in the event of an emergency...... grrrrrrrr

Lesson learned...... make sure you have everything backed up and do not rely on BH.

[Early Out]

A web host that kept completely reliable backups of every site's data, no matter how often it changed, would cost a lot more than $7 a month. I'm constantly amazed at what people expect for the price of a couple of lattés.

[nitrocrzy]

A web host that kept completely reliable backups of every site's data, no matter how often it changed, would cost a lot more than $7 a month. I'm constantly amazed at what people expect for the price of a couple of lattés.

Only because I authorized them to delete... In my work you backup anything of a customers to be deleted for a short time. grrrrr

[felgall]

You need backups of everything from, your web hosting on your own computer and/or a backup repository such as was mentioned earlier.

[blue skye]

A web host that kept completely reliable backups of every site's data, no matter how often it changed, would cost a lot more than $7 a month. I'm constantly amazed at what people expect for the price of a couple of lattés.

I was sent here by a person who uses this service. After reading this thread, I would never use this service. Not only are the techs rude but they say things like what's in the quote here.

What's your job? I know what the job of the Dunkin' Donuts dude is. He makes me a couple of lattes. So what's yours?

This guy's problem, if I'm understanding correctly, was being unable to get a backup of his site because he was locked out of his cPanel and cron was disallowed for large jobs.

One of the problems with hosts like you is that you like to talk "unlimited" but that's just not true.

All I can say is no way would I give my business to a company whose techs are rude and sarcastic.

You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

[Early Out]

You've obviously missed the "Read before posting" thread at the top of the forums. This is a user-to-user site, not a BH support site. The moderators are not BH employees, and we can say whatever we like. We're not BH "techs." We have no connection with BH, other than being satisfied customers.

[areidmtm]

This guy's problem, if I'm understanding correctly, was being unable to get a backup of his site because he was locked out of his cPanel and cron was disallowed for large jobs.

No you're not understanding correctly. His account was suspend for allegedly housing personal backups on his account.

[felgall]

This guy's problem, if I'm understanding correctly, was being unable to get a backup of his site because he was locked out of his cPanel and cron was disallowed for large jobs.

No his problem was that the account was suspended for breaching the terms of service.


One of the problems with hosts like you is that you like to talk "unlimited" but that's just not true.

We don't provide hosting to anyone. We just run web sites that use hosting and the hosting we use is with BlueHost. Since we have some experience of how BleHost's hosting works we try to help out other BlueHost users to help them solve their problems. Since we don't sell hosting at all there is no aspect of the hosting that we don't sell that is "unlimited" or otherwise.


All I can say is no way would I give my business to a company whose techs are rude and sarcastic.


I have never known any of BlueHost's techs to be either rude or sarcastic but then the service they have provided is so good that I have rarely needed to contact them.

[nitrocrzy]

No you're not understanding correctly. His account was suspend for allegedly housing personal backups on his account.

I got an email message saying my site was causing performance issues. This is total BS because I monitor my site and it's visitors and there is very little legitimate traffic. Most visitors are spammers looking for a way in. Without any warning they suspended my account and gave me 15 days to move off BH. I was on vacation so when I contacted support they said that the email message was incorrect and that I was violating TOS by having backups and that I was right and my site was not causing any site issues. The real problem was it was too big. Therefore I had them identify all files supposedly violating the TOS. The problem was the only computer I had with me was my iphone. They only identified 2 files/folders that were causing a problem. I gave them the authority to delete all backups that had *.tar.gz. The other folder that was a problem was a backup of my gallery because of a gallery upgrade, I had a temporary backup to verify the new install, which makes my site extremely large. If you think BH is a unlimited service... better think again. When I gave the tech permission to delete the two offending files\directories... he went above and beyond and went thru the whole site deleting willy nilly. He got pic's I used for forums, signatures and lots of videos' that I link to from my site. All this without thinking to have a backup of what he was deleting.

When I returned, I didn't discover they had deleted as much as they did but should have suspected it by the amount they reduced of my site overall.

When I called to have my site related files put back.... I was told that since my site is so large they have no way to restore those files. They only back up sites 4gb and less.

As a provider, I always recommended BH but l've had absolutely the crappiest service in the last two years. If I knew a better one, I'd be long gone.
Any suggestions?

[Early Out]

I guess we're just going to go around and around on this one, but the bottom line remains that you stored a humongous amount of stuff on your account that wasn't directly related to your site. In your own words, "Thousands of 10mb pictures.... The gallery backup was only until verifying the new install."

The fact that you regarded it as temporary doesn't mean that it was OK under the TOS. You violated the TOS, and got caught. Granted, BH didn't handle it very well, but you obviously presented them with a wholesale violation of their TOS, and they did what they needed to do to deal with it. It was done in a clumsy way, but you created the problem in the first place, right? If you hadn't stored all those files, BH wouldn't have deleted anything at all from your space, would they?

In a phrase common in the legal world, you do not come to this issue with "clean hands."

[areidmtm]

Well I'm sorry that we're wrong. We still can't help you. Not sure what help you wanted us users to give you other then this: Find another host.

Sorry, thread closed.