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Many customers of 123-Reg have woken up and checked their website, like they do every single morning, but it’s not been there. No they didn’t type in the URL wrong, yes the internet is connected, the website has simply been deleted.
‘Oops.’ Says 123-Reg.
It appears that the popular web hosting firm has accidentally deleted and unspecified number of its customers’ websites. If you are a customer of 123-Reg, I’d check everything was in working order if I were you.
This company hosts over 1.7 million sites in the UK alone, they are a very trusted and respected company. They said that there was an error made during maintenance that effectively deleted what was on some of its servers. You’d think an error this extreme wouldn’t be able to even happen.
What even is website hosting?
Websites are hosted on computers called servers that can be handle being used by thousands or even millions of people at the same time. They have the capacity to be the host to all of these live websites.
You can of course opt to have a private server this would be a dedicated computer that hosts only one website. This could make the speed of your website much quicker and be slightly more safe to these kinds of errors happening, but they are very rare and plus, private servers can be very expensive.
The cheapest option is to use a VPS (virtual private server). This is a machine that can host hundreds of websites, but mimics the functionality of a private server.
Of course this comes with risks, for example, if a maintenance mistake is made on one of these VPS systems then it is possible to wipe out many websites in one go.
123-Reg Deleted Sites
You would never think of this being able to even happen, but alas, nothing is impossible.
123-Reg do not keep a back up of every single one of their sites, so they have asked that if yours has been one of the ones unfortunate enough to be deleted, to rebuild it on their own if they have paid for the 123-red back up, or if they have a back up of their own.
Of course, many people will not have this, and are worried that their websites are lost forever. Which could be the case, but 123-red have started a recovery process to try and get back the data from the websites that they have lost.
This is a seriously big issue in terms of a hosting service. The one thing they are asked to do is host a website. This could cause some serious issues for companies who are using 123-reg as their hosting server.
Not entirely sure I would like to be one of the maintenance people over at 123-reg today.
Moral of the article? Always keep a back up of everything. Especially your website. And then back up your back up. And then..you get the point!