Worst case – a scenario becomes true

This is what “Solid Hosting” is saying about themselves:

“Solid Hosting is the best quality, cost friendly web hosting company in the Philippines. Our prices are the cheapest and most affordable prices available in the Philippines. Our services are quick and easy to reach. We are the Local Philippine webmasters choice of web hosting.”

Last week, on Tuesday February 5, the following message landed in the mailboxes of their customers:

“Hi Clients, Our server was reported to be hosting phishing URLs and the data center has unplugged the said server causing it to be inaccessible. We are trying our best to regain control of the server again. We will keep you posted on the matter by time to time. With this, we ask for your patience and understanding.”

On Thursday February 7, the next nice message arrived:

“Hi Clients, We apologize if it took us more than 24 hours to post an update as we were busy copying all the data we can from the remote server backup. We were able to restore partial backups we got for Dallas03 and its reseller accounts. We were able to get 100% of all databases for this server in case a client will need it. We are now downloading partial backups for Dallas02 which is approximately 300GB. We will continue to update you on a regular basis.”

On Saturday, February 9, the customers learned that not all data can be restored and that it might still take some time to restore the websites:

“We have finished download all the data that we can get from the remote backup server. We are now manually restoring data one by one and we ask for your patience and understanding regarding this matter.
For some accounts that we were not able to get the data, we were able to all the databases that you can use to restore your account’s content.
We will regularly update our announcement page on the status of our restoration process.
Again, we humbly ask for your patience and understanding.”

Today, Monday February 11, they informed their customers:

“Hi Client,
We finished downloading whatever we can get from the remote backup server. As a precaution, we recreated your account and login details were sent to the registered email we have on file.
If you have email accounts created on your cPanel, kindly recreate those as it is affected by the outage.
For accounts hosted on this server, we managed to salvaged some home directories and we are using those to restore accounts. As for the databases, we have at least 95% backed up and can be used also to recreate your account.”

One week later, most of the 389 hosted websites are still down! Neither websites or databases are still lost. This means by this evening 98.356% availability. Industry standard is 99.999%

Is “Solid Hosting” a ‘Cheap Charlie’? We’ll see and inform you.