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For those who wants to know. Do you have backups?
Yes! They are in the same rack and without power we can't restore anything. Unless something bad happened. The information we have is that they are intact.
What we’ve been seeing is that many customers have backups from 2023 or 2024, and no recurring backups at all. That’s alarming. Backups should be performed regularly, not at such long intervals. Not everyone, of course, but we’ve seen cases like this. It’s a problem because we’re in an era where backing up should be common sense.
Once again, we repeat: For anyone who wants it, we are offering temporary solutions for those with a VPS in the Netherlands or a refund.
The refund may take a few days as the finance department will handle it. Regarding the activation of services in Moldova, don’t forget that there are customers asking us to perform the restoration using the old backup they have. This increases the number of tickets and affects the speed with which we can respond.
We are doing our best. A big thank you to all the customers who are standing by us and to the entire community and users who have supported us.
Thank you, and perhaps (no promises) there may be some news this week.
Again, when we have news we will announce.
Alexhost
@TimboJones I am not saving anything. I would have deployed a new server elsewhere on day one if this provider hadn't spent the first 48 hours feeding me generic "we are fixing it ASAP" templates instead of providing clear, timely information.
When a company takes your money, causes a 6-day blackout, and then ghosts your emergency ticket for 3 full days after promising a quick fix, pointing that out is called holding them accountable. Keep paying double for broken services if that’s your hobby, but don't lecture me on how to run a business.
3-2-1 should be the common sense. Off-site backup is a must. Absence of mirror in other region is a costly mistake. Datacenter could caught fire, raided, droned and a tactical nuclear airdrop would be devastating.
If the data is critical, people should back it up. If zero backup are made, then the data must be worthless
How many 5€/m providers do you know with true off-site backups? it's customers duty
to keep their backups ready. For a provider it will mean giving 2x space for the price of
the single server. Not really realistic with lowend pricing.
If the provider provides backup (e.g slot/daily/weekly backup), then it's provider's liability to have it properly stored for DR.
If they don't, then it's customers liability.
But, it's reckless to rely on a single backup strategy. For SMEs, that's 2 to 4 digits (dollar) productivity loss per hour. A single black swan could wipe out multi-year savings from not having multiple backups.
SMEs don't use 5€/m VM from Alexhost hoping for free off-site backups. If they do,
they need to fire their sysadmin and hire someone responsible
You know what ASAP stands for, right? In case you don't let me quickly enlighten you: It stands for As Soon As Possible - emphasis on possible. It says nothing about quick or even instant.
As far as "clear, timely information" is concerened: They can't provide those since the situation is for the most part outside of their control and given the circumstances aren't exactly a secret you could have known that pretty early on just as it was basically public knowledge that this could easily drag on for some time.
You have a bit of a point in regards to the wait on the replacement VPS but at this point you have voiced that point and you know the situation making any further harping on it into a pure waste of time.
If getting your business back on track is so unimportant to you that you'll rather spend time on a public forum barking at the moon than do what is needed to mitigate the problem you'll probably have to life with people questioning your abilities.
You didn't answer @TimboJones's question in regards to your payment term but lets just say your on an annual plan. What's that going to translate to on a VPS? $200 should be a pretty generous estimate. Seems your business being down for 6 days isn't even worth $200 since otherwise you would have acted by now even if getting a refund later on would really be as impossible as you are making it out to be (hint: it's not).
We do btw, however I'm not advertising this feature as I do not provide any SLA for it. We operate on per-restore charge basis, unless it is caused by something like drive failure.
any word on this @alexhost
The question is if you are able to provide raw disk images of any of your customers in case you have a complete power loss in any of your locations. Because he didn't lose the customers data, nLighten, or should I call them nLightsOff, decided to cut down the power to his entire rack space. So we are not talking about a disk failure here which is a simpler issue to resolve even if you have some kind of RAID on the host.
Never had a need to do that, but there is technical possibility to provide images on request.
Yes.
The message clearly states what we do. We are offering a refund if you are not satisfied. We are providing a temporary VPS as an alternative option, allowing the customer to choose between a refund or an additional temporary VPS until the issue is resolved.
We won’t get involved in drama, nor will we be dramatic, let alone engage in pointless arguments. The message is clear. We are doing our best; we aren’t perfect, that’s true.
We want the situation resolved as soon as possible too, as this also affects our support.
So, for now, we have two options for customers.
For those who haven’t had the service activated yet, please send us the ticket number via private message.
We’re sorry for what’s happened; we’re dealing with it as quickly as possible – we’re not messing about. We know it’s annoying, and once again we ask for your understanding of the situation. Due to legal advice, we cannot provide any further information. There is plenty of information and links posted online. Please read them and understand that the problem cannot be solved with a mere ‘click’ or an instant magic button.
We don’t want to play the victim, nor do we want to make promises we can’t keep; we’ll do our best and we’re taking action. We don’t want to be dramatic. We just want to use the backup we have and restore everything as far as possible; the rest is secondary. Our customers are important to us, and so is their data. Even more so than the rest of the hardware. The most important thing is to recover the data; we’ll see about the rest later.
Thank you,
Alexhost
I think whats actually clear is you're ignoring the question with a lot of unrelated words.
You've stated repeatedly a "total refund" where your cs is saying partial/prorated.
Which is it?
Anyway I'll stop as I'm just an amused observer, wiggle wiggle.
e.g. you have annually server from March 1st, you'll receive a refund for 9 months, and so on.
What he meant to say is
You had a server from May 1st - you get 11 months.
You had a server from January 1st - you get 7 months.
You had a server from July 15 2025 - you get 1.5 months.
Or do you believe it is fair to ask for 12 months refund, for a service paid in 2025?
SME stands for small-medium enterprise. That's from one-man company to hundreds of employees. For non-IT company, that's 5-20 people at max. Larger companies has tendencies of skipping hosts other than hyperscalers because they don't want to get demoted or fired in case of system failure. There's hearsay, "Nobody got fired because of choosing AWS".
my beliefs aren't relevant in the slightest, i'm asking why he keeps saying total refund if it's prorated.
Shouldn't both parties have their role in DR? Providers and customers should maintain their own DR plans.
That's the point. If provider provides backup slots, customer are expected to maintain the backup interval so when SHTF, the backup could be deployed + recovery from artifacts e.g WAL. If the node that stores the backup is taken offline too, there's no viable DR.
If the customer depends on the system availability, they should maintain warm nodes.
So, here’s the thing. A customer has been using the service all these months without any major issues, right up until around June 1 and June 2—so why should we refund them for the months when everything worked perfectly?
We’re offering two options, and there may be more options in the future. We want the customer to have choices.
We have a high number of support tickets—too many. It’s not just a matter of reactivating services; we have people asking the same questions over and over, others who haven’t backed up their data in years, and so on.
Not to mention the rest of the services and locations. So yes, we are taking time to reactivate all services, because there are quite a few customers. We are doing everything in our power. Refunds are being issued for those who want to cancel and choose to do so; I think that’s a valid and respectful option.
Alexhost
lol
Checks my notes
Nope, no 6-day outages for me, ever. I don't know the complexity, but if it was for production, it would have been ready to go in the background at a moment's notice, or deployed elsewhere within 48 hours.
It doesn't matter if it was 3 days or 20, at what point would you restore elsewhere? We've established 48 hours came and went and you waited another 4 days without doing anything.
It appears you lack judgement and need hand holding. This sitting and doing nothing for those 6 days would get YOU fired for incompetence.
The yellow part you quoted is pretty clear, so you come across as badgering unless you clarify on what you're asking specifically.
If they made a purchase within 30 days of the outage, you get full refund. Otherwise, prorated.
March 1 purchase got 3 months service and 9 months refund.
Yes the yellow part I quoted is what's different from what the representative has stated several times here, thus my asking the question. Prorated is obviously what you'd expect, so stop saying full refund.
Anyway see where you quoted me saying I was done, stop forcing me to respond.
99.99% uptime is a crazy lie though. i know thats not alexhost fault
I feel like people are expecting too much on a lowend provider.
You get what you paid for.
Imagine you buy a server somewhere and expect it to be online. Youre right though, these are really crazy expectations.
Am i the only one who thinks its quite comical to lecture somebody about backups right after youre admiting you dont have access to your own backups?
I was reading the threads here and people are really crazy to expect @alexhost to use more than one upstream provider instead of relying on one incase they go down.
Seriously though where do you think their pricing came from if there were extreme redundancy measures, they wouldn't be considered lowend.
Maybe. All the upstreams in the world won't help when they don't have access to their servers though. My crystal ball says that if it would have been just about finding another upstream or even physically moving the racks to another DC those servers would already be online again.