The great A2 Hosting Windows TITSUP has entered its second week as the company continues to struggle to recover from a security breach that forced its System Operations team to shut down all its Windows services.
To recap, things went south on 23 April as malware spread over the company's Windows operation, causing a problem so severe that the A2 Hosting team decided the only way to recover was to restore data from backups. The company told furious customers last week that "Restores continue to progress at a steady pace".
Except, alas, things have not gone smoothly.
As some services gradually tottered into life, users made the horrifying discovery that the backups being restored from were less than minty fresh.
A "day or two" is bad enough for an ecommerce site, but the loss of several months' worth of data is an altogether angrier bag of monkeys. To make matters worse, the company has left it to users to work out just how whiffy those backups are.
Register reader David Sapery, who was lucky enough to see his services stagger back to life after a five-day liedown, was then somewhat embarrassed when his customers, finally able to access his sites, told him things looked a tad outdated.
Sapery told us: "Anything on any of my websites that was updated over the past 2+ months is gone."
Still, Sapery was at least able to recover. Another reader was not so lucky, describing his experience as "an unmitigated disaster."
Having spent eight months and "thousands of dollars", the unfortunate A2 Hosting customer told us that "my business and all my hard work has been gutted within seven days by a hosting company that clearly did not have robust security in place."
A2 Hosting will, of course, point to its Terms of Service where it makes it quite clear that it is not responsible for any data loss and that users are responsible for their own backups.
To recap, things went south on 23 April as malware spread over the company's Windows operation, causing a problem so severe that the A2 Hosting team decided the only way to recover was to restore data from backups. The company told furious customers last week that "Restores continue to progress at a steady pace".
Except, alas, things have not gone smoothly.
As some services gradually tottered into life, users made the horrifying discovery that the backups being restored from were less than minty fresh.
A "day or two" is bad enough for an ecommerce site, but the loss of several months' worth of data is an altogether angrier bag of monkeys. To make matters worse, the company has left it to users to work out just how whiffy those backups are.
Register reader David Sapery, who was lucky enough to see his services stagger back to life after a five-day liedown, was then somewhat embarrassed when his customers, finally able to access his sites, told him things looked a tad outdated.
Sapery told us: "Anything on any of my websites that was updated over the past 2+ months is gone."
Still, Sapery was at least able to recover. Another reader was not so lucky, describing his experience as "an unmitigated disaster."
Having spent eight months and "thousands of dollars", the unfortunate A2 Hosting customer told us that "my business and all my hard work has been gutted within seven days by a hosting company that clearly did not have robust security in place."
A2 Hosting will, of course, point to its Terms of Service where it makes it quite clear that it is not responsible for any data loss and that users are responsible for their own backups.