I share review about In Motion Hosting
I've been using InMotionHosting for about seven years for both my own and my client's sites and web apps and I continue to recommend their services confidently to anyone who asks. That said, a recent experience has shown me some limitations in their ability to help in what is, granted, an unusual circumstance.
Here's the deal: About a month ago, one of my end users contacted me to report that some files she'd uploaded via my application had gone missing. She saw them there a few days before, but now they were gone. I logged into the FTP server and went to the document upload directory -- and discovered to my dismay that every single file that had been uploaded over the last six years was gone. I got on the phone with InMotionHosting support and they were able to restore their most recent backup to a separate folder. As a consequence, I retrieved 99% of the missing files. This was a close call because if we hadn't caught it that day, restoring the backup would have been useless due to the fact that it would have contained a copy of the empty directory.
As a result of this incident, I decided to create my own backup system to keep a permanent off-site repository of the critical files. I used CloudFusion, a PHP-based system that integrates with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Now, every time someone uploads a file, it gets copied to the Amazon S3 system. If you want to learn how to do this, please contact me and I'd be happy to help.
Two weeks after the initial incident, I got another report of a missing file. I checked the upload folder and found that it had again been wiped out. Fortunately, I now had a way to recover all files from my S3 backup so everything was cool. I scoured my code for any possible way that it could have inadvertently wiped files and was unable to find anything suspicious. I now check every few days to see if there have been any further incidents and so far, so good.
. . . At least for that site. I maintain a second site for the same client that does approximately the same thing but for a different part of their business. This past Friday, I got an email from an end user who could not find some uploaded files. With mounting horror, I looked at the upload directory and found that all files and sub-directories were gone. Only a handful of files that had been uploaded in the past couple of weeks remained. I contacted InMotionHosting support and had them restore from their backup. This time, no joy -- it contained just the recent files. Fortunately I had made a backup of the upload directory a few weeks before while updating the software and was thus able to recover nearly every file. This site now has an S3 backup (something I wish I'd done while I was working on the other site).
The good folks in the InMotionHosting Tier 2 support have done their best to find the reason for these mysterious deletions but they can't find anything in the logs that would explain them. That's why I'm posting here, in the hope that someone can provide me with a plausible explanation or suggest some place to look for answers.
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