First, my apologies for taking so long to approve your comment — it got buried in the spam.

Second, next time you feel the need to publicly bitch-slap me, have the courage to sign your name to it.

Now, some answers:

Did Site5 handle the issue AFTER the data loss in a professional manner? Yes. Offering a 12-month refund was a classy move.

Did I lose a few days of a data from a database that was not being automatically backed up? Yes. Was that my fault? Yes.

However, the fact remains that Site5 made one of the CLASSIC, textbook errors in backup — failing to test your restores. This is singularly unprofessional — and I think the public at large should know that.

Now that you know that, you can make your own decisions — since you’re apparently comfortable hosting with Site5, my “whining” serves as a warning that you should set up automatic backup procedures with a frequency appropriate to the value of your data. You won’t make the same mistake I did, of assuming that a twice-weekly manual backup is sufficient.

As for me, I prefer to use a host who has NOT recently had a huge, public, and very preventable blunder. I’m currently very satisfied with Pair.com and NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Thanks for reading the site.

So then your backups were good enough that you were able to rebuild your site instantly, right?

Oh, you didn’t do backups? It’s not Site5 you should be mad at, especially since they were willing to credit you 12 months of service either way. You’re angry at yourself because you were too lazy to do backups and want to blame whoever is closest.

If you think jumping to another web host will save you from having to do backups, good luck. No web host will guarantee accurate backups because it is and has always been the customer’s responsibility.

The sign that Site5 was willing to credit you 12 months should make you say, “Holy crap, what an awesome host! Most web hosts would credit me a single month if anything at all” but instead you choose to whine.

P.S. The big twist: I’m not even a Site5 user/employee. I’m someone who read your post, undecided about switching to Site5 and you sold me on making the move. Think GoDaddy’s going to give you a year’s hosting fees back when their server craps on itself? Ha!

Cool. Thanks, ChupaCadabra!