Don't trust your hosting provider

This weekend was quite eventful. At least on the negative side. Some may have wondered what happened to this blog. Why has it disappeared and why is there only a limited set of content available?

This blog has been hosted on two dedicated servers rented from a hosting company in Florida. The content was stored on a mirrored drive (not RAID-1, but an rsync mirror) and everything has pretty stable for a very long time. But there is always some new experience to be made...

At the beginning of this month I asked the provider for my two dedicated servers about the terms to cancel my current contract. As my Panama office has a 2 mbps dedicated circuit and it's running fine I was thinking along the lines of 'why pay for two dedicated servers far away, when you got everything right there in your own office'. The idea makes sense and moving to my own system would definitely save some money.

So my hosting provider in Florida - let's be fair and not bash him here in public - answered quite quickly. It wouldn't be any problem. I can get out of the contract without much hassle and it would be nice to vacate the machines till September 22nd. I should tell them when I were ready.

I wasn't ready and didn't gave them the green light to decommission the machines. One would expect that they simply extend the month-to-month contract and nothing would happen. Not in this case. Apparently the sales person had promised the very same servers to someone else and by September 22nd someone in their datacenter executed his orders and wiped the disks of my two boxes in order to allow a new customer to move in.

When I noticed the absence of my services this last Saturday I emailed them and a trouble ticket was opened. After a few hours without any response I decided to call them. But ... Where is their phone number. It turned out that they prefer email. After some digging I eventually found a phone number of their parent company and someone in India answered my call. Although this person was very nice he wasn't exactly helpful. It took until Sunday when finally a confirmation for what I've feared arrived. Both servers were decommissioned and redeployed for another customer.

Don't trust your hosting provider. When you rent dedicated servers you can create whatever complex and "secure" configuration as you like. A simple human error by a sales person can wipe out everything.

It was the first time for me that I've used a hosting provider instead of hosting the machine myself at the end of my own road to the Internet. I've grown at a time when the Internet consisted of networks and not big pipes between datacenters. My own server, my own UPS, my own line. Sounds complex, might be slow - depends on the load -, but it's my control, my decision and not somebody else's. So I'm back to hosting my own stuff on my own hardware at my end of the line. This time it's a virtual server running on top of a little AMD X2 64 powered HP Pavillion (quite a server :-)) in my office here in Panama. Nobody will fiddle with that setup again.

Unfortunately I have to leave in a few hours for a short trip and can't proceed rebuilding this site. But when I return I'll make it nice looking again. At least it was an opportunity to switch to the 2.0 release of the Pebble blog software.