justinshattuck.com— Yutter was deleted last night following a so-called suspension on behalf of steadfast. This should turn some heads....
Aug 3, 2006View in Crawl 4
It is true we made no attempt to recover the data. It had most definitely already been overwritten by other customer data and it was not possible to do such recovery without shutting down over 30 other customers' VPS servers. We regret that the billing issue occured that resulted in the account being deleted, but there was nothing we could do after it happened to recover the deleted content. It was an automated system that deleted the account, not anything malicious on our part, and we would certainly like to make sure that is understood by anyone wishing to hold a grudge. If we could have recovered the files, we would have very gladly have retreived and returned them to the site owner.
After reading the conversation that had taken place between your staff and David B. I can say that you didn't do anything "very gladly" to assist with this colossal mess up. It took several hours for you to even figure out what actually did happen to the account. Maybe you should take a look at the code behind your automated system, there is obviously a flaw. I wasn't aware it was common practice to delete customers' files in leu of suspending the account per further follow up. If your company is hurting for disk space that much, maybe you should think about increasing your prices in order to fund such an endeavor, of course if you raised your prices you'd probably have to look into seriously enhancing your customer support.
We had a VPS site with steadfast as of about 2 hours ago. We received a rash of emails that had been backed up in their billing system, indicating that we were past due on a payment to cover the next 3 months. The guy who pays the site, uses the invoice to make a paypal payment once he gets the invoices, which in this case never came.Earlier this evening (Saturday btw!) some batch job on their side kicked in, and the site was turned off, and according to tech support deleted. After talking to tech support "probably" all of our data was deleted. So to be clear, when their broken billing system determined that we were due to pay our next payment about 35 days ago, it allowed for a 2 week grace period. Once it decided that we were past due, it rm -f'd our entire site. I'd also note for the record, that they have a phone number on file that they could have called. I could go on quite a bit about the number of things that are completely stupid about the way they've set their system up, although at the moment, I'm hoping against hope that the month or so of data in the system (it's a community site, with forums and user contributed content and data that all goes into a database and onto directories on the filesystem that are written by php scripts) isn't completely gone. I'm not sure that this will kill the site, but it's not looking good. I'll return here and provide an update once I know more.
Steadfast are tools.Yup, they killed our site. Same story... a vps that they don't back up. They have a nice story about that that makes no sense. Their software is buggy. Mails backed up, no notice, kablam.... they rm -rf our site, a 3 year old free movie review site. I have the screen shots of our account showing that it indicated no payment problem. Yes, the dumb kid who handled the finance side of the site, didn't monitor the payment status (we were paying quarterly by paypal) and we owed a payment, but Steadfasts email engine was clearly backed up, because we got 4 emails all in one shot, and this was on a Friday night, whenever their billing cron job runs.Clearly Steadfast is such a moronic fly by night crap works, that reclaiming the same amount of diskspace Google gmail gives away free is more important to them than a customer's site. It's not a case of not having a backup, it's a case of someone you are paying for a service, who, the hour their system shows you owe them a dollar, automatically goes and wipes the disk clean. That's just bad business practice designed by someone who's clueless and should get out of the hosting business.Did we have a backup? Yes.. of course our site was free as well, so we weren't as current as we should have been and lost several weeks of reviews, and forum contents. It was enough of a loss for us that it killed the site.Steadfast's attitude during the entire thing was completely assinine. Not only did they tell us it was our fault, they never offered one bit of help, or a dollar credit.
garrettAug 3, 2006
This is seriously screwed up...
ajvanAug 7, 2006
Nice that the hosting co. was called Steadfast.
kstangeAug 12, 2006
It is true we made no attempt to recover the data. It had most definitely already been overwritten by other customer data and it was not possible to do such recovery without shutting down over 30 other customers' VPS servers. We regret that the billing issue occured that resulted in the account being deleted, but there was nothing we could do after it happened to recover the deleted content. It was an automated system that deleted the account, not anything malicious on our part, and we would certainly like to make sure that is understood by anyone wishing to hold a grudge. If we could have recovered the files, we would have very gladly have retreived and returned them to the site owner.
stutterAug 14, 2006
After reading the conversation that had taken place between your staff and David B. I can say that you didn't do anything "very gladly" to assist with this colossal mess up. It took several hours for you to even figure out what actually did happen to the account. Maybe you should take a look at the code behind your automated system, there is obviously a flaw. I wasn't aware it was common practice to delete customers' files in leu of suspending the account per further follow up. If your company is hurting for disk space that much, maybe you should think about increasing your prices in order to fund such an endeavor, of course if you raised your prices you'd probably have to look into seriously enhancing your customer support.
fac3lessAug 16, 2006
I was with steadfast for awhile myself -- they're decent but they lack quite a bit in the support department although mainly only regarding network issues.<a class="user" href="http://hostjury.com/reviews/steadfast-networks/">http://hostjury.com/reviews/steadfast-networks/</a>
gizmolaAug 20, 2006
We had a VPS site with steadfast as of about 2 hours ago. We received a rash of emails that had been backed up in their billing system, indicating that we were past due on a payment to cover the next 3 months. The guy who pays the site, uses the invoice to make a paypal payment once he gets the invoices, which in this case never came.Earlier this evening (Saturday btw!) some batch job on their side kicked in, and the site was turned off, and according to tech support deleted. After talking to tech support "probably" all of our data was deleted. So to be clear, when their broken billing system determined that we were due to pay our next payment about 35 days ago, it allowed for a 2 week grace period. Once it decided that we were past due, it rm -f'd our entire site. I'd also note for the record, that they have a phone number on file that they could have called. I could go on quite a bit about the number of things that are completely stupid about the way they've set their system up, although at the moment, I'm hoping against hope that the month or so of data in the system (it's a community site, with forums and user contributed content and data that all goes into a database and onto directories on the filesystem that are written by php scripts) isn't completely gone. I'm not sure that this will kill the site, but it's not looking good. I'll return here and provide an update once I know more.
gizmolaNov 23, 2006
Steadfast are tools.Yup, they killed our site. Same story... a vps that they don't back up. They have a nice story about that that makes no sense. Their software is buggy. Mails backed up, no notice, kablam.... they rm -rf our site, a 3 year old free movie review site. I have the screen shots of our account showing that it indicated no payment problem. Yes, the dumb kid who handled the finance side of the site, didn't monitor the payment status (we were paying quarterly by paypal) and we owed a payment, but Steadfasts email engine was clearly backed up, because we got 4 emails all in one shot, and this was on a Friday night, whenever their billing cron job runs.Clearly Steadfast is such a moronic fly by night crap works, that reclaiming the same amount of diskspace Google gmail gives away free is more important to them than a customer's site. It's not a case of not having a backup, it's a case of someone you are paying for a service, who, the hour their system shows you owe them a dollar, automatically goes and wipes the disk clean. That's just bad business practice designed by someone who's clueless and should get out of the hosting business.Did we have a backup? Yes.. of course our site was free as well, so we weren't as current as we should have been and lost several weeks of reviews, and forum contents. It was enough of a loss for us that it killed the site.Steadfast's attitude during the entire thing was completely assinine. Not only did they tell us it was our fault, they never offered one bit of help, or a dollar credit.