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My KnownHost experience




Posted by Vaporman87, 11-28-2016, 12:58 PM
<> Things with KnownHost were going fine for a while until their hardware suffered a critical failure and the only backup on the system that WASN'T corrupt for some reason was from 6 months prior. That meant I lost six months of site updates, user contributed content, and hard work. You would think they would at least have offered to refund me for the six months of hosting fees I paid for that they lost all content for. Nope. I am issuing this warning to any people looking for a hosting provider... if you are not one of those individuals who backs up their full website on YOUR OWN personal computer on a daily basis... don't use KnownHost. Last edited by Postbox; 11-28-2016 at 02:37 PM.

Posted by Nnyan, 11-28-2016, 01:50 PM
Did you notice the date on this thread? If you felt you needed to you could open your own ticket. That out of the way lets point a few things out. Anyone and everyone has hardware failures and Knownhost has a VERY long history with dealing with issues professionally. I myself have used them for many years with no issues. As for backups KH only provides full image backups once per day up to 7 days old. It is meant for DR only not as a backup for your data. They typically don't keep the backups on the same hardware (as I understand it) so it's a bit weird that ALL your backups were bad. I will say that you have to value your data to keep you own backups no one else is going to. Depending on vendor backups is a VERY bad policy even with great hosts. I will say that after reviewing KH's websites I could say that they could clarify their backup policy a bit more readily.

Posted by DanielP, 11-28-2016, 02:03 PM
@Vaporman87 While we do apologize for what you've experienced this is not the entire case. The reason your backups had been corrupted is the fact that you have a dedicated server with a separate drive intended for your cPanel backups. You had both legacy and new cPanel backups enabled. During this time the customers backup drive reached 100% full, and would have been emailing the customer notices each time the backups failed. During a support ticket a reboot was required on the customers equipment, the primary drive did not survive the reboot and thus had to be replaced. The six months of refund you ask for is not possible. All services were properly provided to you within that 6 month period. I attempted to personally work with you in the billing ticket but after a single reply from me you replied demanding the 6 months refund or else you were going to spend your time travelling across the web attempting to damage our brand with your story. I am truly sorry that you lost 6 months work on your website, but our terms of service are very clear. You are responsible to maintain your own backup copy. We wish you the best of luck in your future hosting endeavours.

Posted by Vaporman87, 11-28-2016, 02:05 PM
I did not. My apologies there. I too had great support from them prior to this issue. Then when things started falling apart, they became very uncaring and I felt as though to them it mattered very little. I don't understand how all the daily backups became corrupted. That still confuses me. I agree with you. The issue is the size of my backups. The site is massive, with tons of images, videos, etc. Downloading a backup to my hard drive on a daily basis would be a near impossibility. I suppose in the end I never considered that a company with such a stellar record would ever lose 6 months of my content. The thought never occurred to me. But now that it has happened, I see that KnownHost is not prepared to handle an issue like this. I'm switching to a service which houses a separate, duplicate of my site at another location, ensuring nothing like this ever happens again.

Posted by Vaporman87, 11-28-2016, 02:34 PM
Would you not have received a similar notice? If so, an email from a staff member alerting me to the potential problems that this could cause would have been nice. To someone who isn't a hosting whiz kid, just somebody who needs a company to keep my site up and running, it would have really benefited me to receive an email like this to explain to me the problems that could be on the horizon. I understand this now. I had counted on the reliability of the backups being saved to my server. The thought had never occurred to me that something like this could happen, especially under the control of such a highly regarded provider. I see that your company is not able to provide the services I need to keep this from ever happening again. I could not damage your brand if I wanted to. My intention is two-fold. One: Let others know that if they are a consumer like me, relying on the capabilities of a provider to keep things like this from happening, then they need to do more research and know that KnownHost isn't that company. Two: Help you understand that simply blowing off the loss of so much passion and work with a one month credit and a few crumbs is going to result in some difficulties of your own. Had you agreed to even 3 or 4 months of refunds (especially considering I have a credit with you of one month already), I might have felt like you truly did care... and entertained staying with you. I don't wish you or your company ill will. I too wish you the best of luck. I hate that things turned out this way, because before now, things were great.

Posted by Postbox, 11-28-2016, 02:36 PM
Easily fixed, you have your own thread now.

Posted by DanielP, 11-28-2016, 02:57 PM
We are not copied on these emails, as they are sent directly to your email address configured and registered within WHM. @Vaporman87, I do not wish to be harsh here, however, you allowed no time for any such negotiations to take place, nor for us to effectively explain the situation to you. Within less than a 1~ hour time frame from the fact that one of our managers notified you that we are reviewing the situation (after hours I might add) you reply back stating you've already posted multiple complaints and that our initial credit offer to you was not good enough, even though this situation only falls under our SLA for the downtime experienced during the time it took to replace the drive in your server. Had you actually continued to negotiate with us, we may very well have extended a longer credit time, even upto your 3 months. However, rather than countering back and giving us time to fully investigate you immediately jumped to trying to bash us online, without presenting the full story. If you will let's not mince words, it was very clear very quickly that you did not wish to remain with our services. This is fine, that is your right as a consumer. Again, I wish you the best of luck in your future hosting.

Posted by Vaporman87, 11-28-2016, 03:09 PM
I agree with you that I jumped the gun. My site had been offline for almost three days, and the news coming in just kept getting worse. I was in shock that something like this could happen. I relied on the fact that I would be protected from something like this, and I wasn't. But that won't be the case again. So I apologize for my haste. When it came to simply hosting and being there when I needed support, your staff was great. It is clear to me that you simply don't provide the protections and proactive guidance I needed. That is a lesson learned the hard way.

Posted by Nnyan, 11-28-2016, 07:04 PM
@Vaporman87 I'm going to be gentle here as I know how harsh it is to loose data. First you need to know what it is that you are signing up for and what your responsibilities are. You may not know much about hosting but unfortunately that is no one's fault but your own. A host (ANY ) host can not be responsible for EVERY possible situation. You state that an email from KH staff may have given you a different outcome but I am very doubtful, if you for whatever reason you did not respond to the many you got as warning you could have just as easily not responded to a KH one. I get CPanel messages all the time so I know they can be cryptic at times but I realize it's MY responsibility to open tickets if I don't understand one. I'll give you one scenario. You go with Host X who promises you daily backups. Are they also going to do regular tests of those backups on an ongoing basis and validate that the data is 100% whole? Very few VPS hosts offer that type of "hand-holding". Most are like what you have. They will work with you to setup strategies but almost all of them require someone to monitor them. Often you can hire the host to perform some of these tasks but they are not part of typical managed hosting. If you had a dedicated I would suggest you look at hiring and admin company that will oversee the server on a daily basis. But this is a different cost structure which is as it should be.

Posted by SenseiSteve, 11-28-2016, 07:40 PM
A lot of mistakes made here and acknowledged. You need to be very clear with your next web hosting provider what you're expecting from them, and cross check what they say against their TOS.

Posted by xlightwaverx, 11-28-2016, 10:25 PM
Always send your backups to another country.

Posted by Mike_A, 11-28-2016, 10:38 PM
Wouldn't just sending it to another network work...

Posted by xlightwaverx, 11-28-2016, 10:41 PM
Yup, I try to keep them far apart in case of catastrophic events.

Posted by Maple-Hosting, 11-28-2016, 11:18 PM
Whenever a customer is trying to get his money back by threatening a company with bad reviews even when he's in the wrong, it ends up becoming clear when the host shares his side of the story. My honest opinion is that this way of "doing business" from the customers' part is an epidemic in the hosting world and it's absolutely horrible.



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