Some clients of Sharkspace got a reminder today of why all hosting patrons need to keep their own back-ups of their data.

Yesterday morning started with the Sharkspace company network forum posting:

 Affecting Server - S9C4 | Priority - Critical

The server S9C4 will be taken offline shortly and a manual FSCK (file system check)will be completed to fix a file system error. We will keep you updated in this post.

And it went down hill from there. The FSCK became a hardware failure then the new hardware revealed corrupt data which then lead to corrupt back-ups. Numerous updates later ended with

A Final Note:
The server and backups are corrupt. At this point we are sending new welcome emails to clients. Please change your dns to the ones listed in the welcome email and restore your accounts from your personal backup.

We are extremely sorry and will provide a 1 yr account credit once things settle down to all affected clients....

While this downtime affected only the clients on one particular server, throughout the ordeal Sharkspace kept these clients well informed with regular updates in a most professional manner. The exact cause of the outage is still under investigation.

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