SmarterASP blames power outage for thousands of lost databases
The hosting business has washed its hands of the whole affair
Thousands of European customers of a Californian hosting business have reported an ongoing issue that is stopping them - or anyone else - from accessing their own websites, and may have wiped all of the databases stored in one of the company's data centres. Clients say the hosting company has lost "everything," although the situation is still developing.
SmarterASP.net is an ASP.NET hosting business in California, serving customers around the world from three of its own data centres, including one in Europe. On Thursday last week, customers on the European data centre found themselves unable to access their websites or servers, and were left in the dark for several hours.
Around 18:00 PST (2am BST), 10 hours after the outage began, the company posted a message to its website blaming the problem on a power outage.
Despite claims of a 'short interruption', and initial reports that some servers were back online, other customers were not so lucky. A few hours later, the company sent the following email:
'We had an huge outage in our EU datacenter last night. As the result, few of our database servers were badly damaged along with backup data of those servers. We deeply apologize for this incident. We never had such problem before for the past 20 years and we are now in the process of making changes to prevent this from ever happening again. If you have backup of your databases, please restore it from your control panel and your site should be working again.'
Some customers - but not all - also received an offer of 18 months of free hosting service as compensation for this incident. A small poll on the SmarterASP Server Issues Facebook page showed that only around 15 people, of the 65 who had responded at the time of writing, had received the compensation offer.
Clients without local backups appear to be out of luck, as reports indicate that SmarterASP has lost everything. Live chat responses say the company is 'very sorry', points customers to their account root folder to check for backups, and cheekily advises them to make local backups in the future.
Unsurprisingly, the company's response is fuelling anger online. One affected individual said, "We pay extra backup for what? 18 month of free hosting are nothing, I think our client want the data back, or a lot of [money]. It's ridiculous."
Another customer, who contacted us directly, described the situation as "a disaster for thousands of customers/webshops... We are quite desperate, we don't know what to do."
It's not a good look for SmarterASP, which promises 99.9 per cent uptime on its 'Why Us?' page. To add insult to injury, it also says, 'Smarterasp.net guarantees the highest quality product, top security, and unshakeable reliability'.
The company was last in the news almost exactly two years ago, when it suffered a ransomware attack. However, that time the firm was able to recover the lost data.
Unfortunately there is no law requiring hosting firms to offer backup services, and even the larger companies like Godaddy and Rackspace assume no responsibility for backing up customers' data. This is a common misconception in the field, and probably the reason that so many SmarterASP customers are currently in meltdown mode - many having already reported losing customers.