

Webhost "Peachy Dandy" disappears... with my sites - AretNCarlsen

Peachy Dandy [peachydandy.com], the web hosting service for two of my domains, ceased to be sometime on Sunday 2011-02-13. Nameserver domains unregistered, control panels inaccessible. No warnings, no email notifications, no refunds of prepaid [quarterly/annual] account balances. Sales and support contacts unresponsive. Owner refuses to acknowledge that he was ever affiliated with the company.<p>Note that they appeared perfectly legitimate: reselling on behalf of a reputable firm [Hawk Host], offering a normal range of hosting plans from a few dollars a month to $80 or so. They had hosted these two domains for 18 months without any significant downtime, and had responded quickly to my (few) support tickets over that time period.<p>Neither domain hosted mission-critical services, just a company blog and web-facing marketing material. The MX records pointed to another mailserver provider. Therefore I had no automated monitoring pointed at either domain, and did not immediately realize that the servers had gone down. (My focus was elsewhere; I first found out when I casually attempted to login to Wordpress later in the week.) As a consequence, I lost these web presences for days, and undoubtedly lost company email [as senders could not retrieve the MX records from the nonexistent nameservers].<p>tl;dr moral: Monitor EVERYTHING. What happens if one of YOUR hosting vendors silently evaporates while YOU'RE focusing elsewhere? Write out the entire chain of dependencies for your email domains, web domains, DNS redirects, IP forwarding, etc. Do this again every few months. If a host/service <i>really</i> isn't mission-critical and you therefore don't want to pay for third-party monitoring, at least setup cron jobs such that your hosts/domains cross-check each other at regular intervals. Remember: Your 1337 skill set is <i>useless</i> if you are not aware of priority issues. Don't let what should be just an hour or two of email/www downtime balloon into a serious impact on your brand.
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codyro
I work at Hawk Host - we restored a lot of the Peachy Dandy accounts so you
might want to submit a ticket to our support department
(<https://support.hawkhost.com>) and we'll see if we can get you your stuff.

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AretNCarlsen
You restored my data for me earlier this evening, Cody. Thanks for that.

I'd like to again emphasize: Hawk Host is not at fault. Even so, they're
restoring Peachy Dandy customers' data (for free). I actually intend to move
these domains over to Hawk for hosting.

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bobf
For monitoring, Pingdom has a basic free account with uptime/response time
monitoring and email notifications. If you host your nameservers and email
(Google Apps?) elsewhere, losing a web host isn't _quite_ so bad. I also
unfortunately just went through this with my personal VPS a few days ago, with
Hazenet disappearing off the face of the planet.

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ScottWhigham
Thank you for sharing - sorry that happened :(

