Shieldhost sucks
Don’t ever use Shieldhost. You’ll notice the prominently featured “99.9% uptime guarantee”, but anyone who has ever looked at this website knows I’m down A LOT, and I haven’t gotten any money from them. On Sunday, Derek texted me to tell me, guess what, my website was down. WordPress couldn’t connect to the database. I opened up the control panel, and the whole DB was just missing. I logged an issue on Monday morning, waited 8 hours, and got this email:
Hi,
Sorry for inconvenience caused to you.
The database was not moved due to interuptions during server migration. We have manually moved the databases to new server.
Best Regards
Josh Dotoli
That was nice of him, except he restored my blog with a backup from February. Every article and comment since February 17 was gone as well as some WordPress settings that I had changed in that time. So tonight I have been cutting and pasting from the Google and Yahoo caches to restore my articles. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to do the same with the comments, so those are just gone. Which is a shame, because Elmo had some interesting things to say about parents getting rid of video games at the local movie theater. Oh, well.
Time to go do something more social, now. Like not blogging.
I ran into exactly the same problem. The server migration at Shieldhost managed to lose all my WordPress mysql databases. I had a backup that was newer than what they managed to restore but still lost many posts. I too had to restore many posts from Google and Yahoo caches. What a pain that was! Despite the fact that I had just paid for another year, I moved everything over to Bluehost. Bluehost has been great, and I would highly recommend them. It is a little more expensive but worth it. I do routine backups of my mysql databases now but haven’t needed to use them yet. I’m currently still running a charity organization on Shieldhost (www.stringsofhope.org) but will be switching over to Bluehost as soon as a bunch of exams are done. (I had not kept any backups of the Strings of Hope blog and ultimately had to try and find everything on Google or Yahoo caches.) I have not been impressed with Shieldhost. They definitely have not had 99.9% uptime. I even called them out on this and they said that they would investigate and get back to me. They never got back to me….
I’ve used Shieldhost, and yeah, it does completely suck. Go with Cirtex Hosting instead, they are the best low cost web host I’ve ever used. I saw this from experience having been screwed by Shieldhost repeatedly.
Sad, they’re still treating customers the same way. It’s gotten worse for me with time. SHIELDHOST SUCKS! I’m glad this is high up on Google search results.
🙂