I have always found the hosting at BlueHost satisfactory and I have recommended them to people who have sought my advice. But their customer service as well as their technical services are starting to get worse as demonstrated by the unfortunate incident I experienced this morning.
Here’s what happened.
- I host all projects under the subdomain http://projects.kuzzuk.net which is tied to a sub-folder call “projects_kuzzuk”. So the URLs for my clients look like http://projects.kuzzuk.net/projectname.
- This morning I was using Fantastico to install WordPress for a new project for a client.
- It was my mistake that I entered ” projectname” instead of “projectname” (there was a leading space).
- It returned an error so I tried to uninstall the erroneous installation. But instead of just removing the erroneous folder, it removed my entire sub-folder with all my client projects.
- I contacted BlueHost customer service chat and the guy in the other side asked for my domain thrice even though I had given it to him to begin with. Never mind that, he made another suggestion to use SimpleScripts (an alternative to Fantastico) and I followed instructions. This lead to the correct installation of the new project but all the other projects were still missing. I told him that but he simply didn’t get it (spent half an hour with him). As it didn’t solve the problem, I uninstalled the new installation via simpleScripts (which did not uninstall cleanly) and asked for a full site restore.
- Horror of horrors. He calmly tells me he cannot find any backups and sorry the restore cannot be done. BlueHost brags on its site under “World Class Technology” that it provides “Courtesy Site Backups” (highlighted in red below). In all fairness, they have done a restore for me in the past but my post is how their service is going from bad to worse.
- Now, I’m having so much fun restoring the site manually and hoping it will work.
November 15th, 2008
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