On November 11, 2020 the data from a MySQL database hosted by IONOS suddenly disappeared, which resulted in the termination o
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Mere
f the work of the forum, which has existed for 12 years. There were 101 tables with more than a million messages written by about a thousand users, and suddenly all the tables were emptied and there was no longer any row inside it, not even records concerning the forum software settings.
I immediately contacted the IONOS customer support via email as well as their official facebook and twitter accounts and asked them what happened, how the data disappeared and asked for a backup from them. However, 4 days have passed since then and I have not yet received an answer as to who on their team is responsible for the data loss. As for the backups, it seems that they only have it for the last 7 days, and it turned out that all the backups were faulty. The forum worked correctly on November 10, as well as for several hours on November 11, which is confirmed by the forum community as well Google analytics, which clearly shows that users were active until that moment, and then, on the morning of November 11, attendance suddenly dropped to 0. However, the backup files created by IONOS hosting service for all the last 7 days, from November 4 to 11, contained only the structure of the database without data, ie. there are no INSERT statements and these SQL files were only about 106KB, while the correct database size was above 600MB. They did not give me an explanation of how the data disappeared and why they did not back up the data correctly, which was their obligation. They only pointed to theirs General Terms and Conditions according to which they are not responsible for possible data loss. On the other hand, they advertise their service as fast, secure hosting that's ready to grow including DDoS and data loss protection, which is misleading.
I have been using their services for over 6 years and now when they have lost my extremely valuable data, I have to single them out as an extremely unreliable service with terrible support. I would not recommend this hosting to anyone. Additionally, what surprised me was that I found a copy of someone else's database of over 729MB in the my forum's folder, which means that IONOS can compromise your data easily. Their attitude towards user data is disappointing. I asked them to provide me with at least some older backup, but they don't seem to have it. I paid their Expert hosting package $22.71 per month, including extended support for an older PHP version on my website, what is a pretty high price for a shared hosting with such poor service without any data protection. Indeed, this is an incredibly bad experience for me and my friends with whom I worked on this project which is now irretrievably destroyed. I will change the hosting company as soon as possible.
Mindre
