XFHosting.com Nightmare

Amphicar770

Active member
OK, I was not even going to share this after admins deleted my original post. However, while I am not at all happy with the XF team at the moment, I do not want to see anyone else get hosed. My original post started with asking if anyone else was experiencing problems with XFhosting.com as I did not want to throw them under the bus if it was just an isolated incident. Apparently it is not.

Last Weds afternoon my site went down, along with a second non-XF site. I mean down hard. No cpanel, email, nothing. On Thursday AM I submitted a ticket and was informed their admin is working on it. Further inquiries said nothing more than "thank you for your patience, our admin is working on the issue". When I pushed them to clarify what "the issue" is, they said a RAID drive failed and they are trying to recover it. That makes no sense since RAID arrays are designed so that if a drive fails, the other take over until it is replaced. At this point I am calling BS and my theory is that they probably got hit with a ransomware hack and all of their data is now an encrypted train wreck.

Anyhow, come late Saturday I get a note saying, "they are working on "the issue, what is my userid, and do I happen to have a backup of my files and database". Oh just great, so apparently they do not have backups either. I told them that my last local backup is several months old, they said they will get back to me. Meanwhile, if you check their website, they still report no outages although I am now hearing from others experiencing same thing.

I have had outages with other hosts in the past. At least they were very professional and provided frequent updates and details on what was going on even when it was that they had been hacked. In all cases the hosts had backups at the ready so the worst case was loss of maybe 1 week worth of data. Even when screw-up was my doing, hosts always had backups available.

Today I moved everything (unfortunately using an old backup) to MattW based on recommendation of several folks here. On a Sunday afternoon the response from Matt was immediate. He also assured me of the following ...

Just to put your mind at ease, I do an incremental backup of the files every 6 hours, plus a database backup every 24 hours. They are incremental, and I store 3 months worth. I also do a weekly cPanel account backup, which I store 4 rolling versions. All off on a dedicated backup server. The cPanel backups are also sent to Amazon S3 for redundant storage.​

Should XFHosting manage to recover things I will FTP whatever they have and update at my new host.

RUN, don't walk away from XFhosting.com. They make me miss even the hosts people complain about like GoDaddy.
 
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How much research did you put into this before you signed up with them?

When I first signed up with them, I was under the impression that this was the highly recommended service provided by Mike Edge. At least at the time, there were several recommendations for XFHosting right in this forum. Apparently the naming confused many people which is one of the key reasons Mike Edge changed the name of his services to hosting heroes.

I will say that in terms of performance, etc. everything had been running really well and they were reasonable responsive. Even the number of spammers attempting access dropped dramatically, etc. Still, the true proof of any service provider is what happens when the stuff hits the fan. In this case, a major fail.
 
If I remember correctly, he sold XFHosting to another entity. If so, any recent issues you have had with them are not due to Mike Edge, but the current owners. I believe his current company goes by Forum Heroes.
 
If I remember correctly, he sold XFHosting to another entity. If so, any recent issues you have had with them are not due to Mike Edge, but the current owners. I believe his current company goes by Forum Heroes.

Yeah, that is what I thought too? I think he was also previously XenHosting which was sold, then XFHosting which was sold after I signed up (although if that was the case, existing customers were never informed of the transition). I was going to go with ForumHeroes but got concerned that they too will be sold. Then I saw the recommendations for MattW so I went with him.
 
If I remember correctly, he sold XFHosting to another entity. If so, any recent issues you have had with them are not due to Mike Edge, but the current owners. I believe his current company goes by Forum Heroes.

Almost! :D I sold XF Host (xf.host.net, whom since sold again to just some generic company), XFHosting is from Asia from my understanding. Correct, we are Forum Heroes
 
I think he was also previously XenHosting which was sold, then XFHosting which was sold after I signed up (although if that was the case, existing customers were never informed of the transition). I was going to go with ForumHeroes but got concerned that they too will be sold.

Nope never owned nor was a part of XFHosting. When I started up hosting again, I was XenHosting, but rebranded, not sold due to several people like yourself confused and ordering with the wrong company. In fact you were one of the people that made me realize this and decided on the Forum Heroes rebrand as the result.
 
Still no restore and no additional updates / communication as of today (Monday evening).

As frustrating as the outage is, what is really inexcusable is the lack of communication. I certainly understand that stuff happens in the world of technology despite our best efforts. I have certainly stayed with service providers who dropped the ball but that decision is always based on how they handle the situation.

Some years back I had a hosting provider who also had a major outage. They sent out communications twice daily as to what was wrong, what they were attempting to do about it, progress made, etc. As many sites were impacted, they provided a timeline for estimated recovery, etc.

XFHosting (Bramcolm has done none of this). They have provided almost no information, the little bit they did only after prodding. They have not indicated if backups are available or not (their site claims weekly backups) or if / when they can restore from these. The server status they provide on their web site to customers will tell you that everything is just rainbows, skitttles and unicorns.

In some ways I am disappointed to hear they are based in Indianapolis and not India. I would expect better service and communication from a US based company. Again, its not about the outage byt rather about how you are leaving your impacted customers in the dark.
 
Sorry to hear about your experience with them. No fun, and completely unacceptable.

That said, if your site is important to you, your local backups would not be several months old. You cannot rely strictly on your host's backups, regardless of how frequently they are made.

We make more backups than I care to admit, but I would never, ever, ever tell a client to rely on those backups. So hopefully lesson learned. Take your own backups regularly.
 
Noticing the emails.... so is "SEOvB" running XFHosting? If so, you'd think they'd at least have setup a different email domain to use.

Yes, apparently it is all under the umbrella of Bramcolm.com but I guess they use a single ticketing system.

I do have an old VB account. I guess I should warn the users there to avoid these guys. I really do not like to throw any vendor under the bus. As I said, stuff happens but what is inexcusable is to simply not communicate any information.
 
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We make more backups than I care to admit, but I would never, ever, ever tell a client to rely on those backups. So hopefully lesson learned. Take your own backups regularly.

And restore them often too! Lots of folks forget to do that and after a crash they realize the backup is corrupt...
 
Sorry to hear about your experience with them. No fun, and completely unacceptable.

That said, if your site is important to you, your local backups would not be several months old. You cannot rely strictly on your host's backups, regardless of how frequently they are made.

We make more backups than I care to admit, but I would never, ever, ever tell a client to rely on those backups. So hopefully lesson learned. Take your own backups regularly.

Yup, lesson learned!
 
Admins deleted my post with the ticket thread discussion with XFHosting. I wont bother reposting it. Point is that I have been professional and understanding yet very clear that I would like them to restore from whatever latest backup they might have. The standard response was always, "our admin is working on it". I even asked that if nothing can be done that they simply inform me of such. They essentially stopped responding at all on the 17th. Inexcusable and highly unprofessional.
 
Develop an automated backup process, two different processes at least, that run independently every 12 hours. Ensure the backups go to diverse secured endpoints not associated with your hosting provider.

Afterwards, you can love yourself much more ;)
 
@MattW set up a backup script for my VPS that backs up files and database several times a day and keeps several days worth of them stored on a VPS with another company called Backupsy so it's not with the same provider of my VPS and truly are off site.
 
I actually heard back from owner of XenHosting. While issue is still unresolved, at lease I finally received the courtesy of an update beyond "our admin is working on it". Here is the latest
==================================================
This is the status update for the failed disk situation.

We have been working with our data center to recover the failed disks on their end. With all the attempts, they informed us that both of the two disks failed and they could not load them to the server. We attempted to work with them to attach the failed disks to another server that we have so that we can try to read any data out. But their management informed us that they could not do that. The last option that they provided to us is to ship the two failed disks to us for us to attempt to read it ourselves. The shipping of the disk is in process and we hope to receive it soon to attempt to recover the data on our site here.

We are doing everything we can to attempt to recover the data and we will keep you posted.

Thanks,
Jarvis
President, CEO @ SEOvB.com
============================================​
 
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