HostPapa: Incompetence or Malice?

This problem was supposed to be fixed by now. As you can see, it isn’t, and I’m starting to become more than a little suspicious that HostPapa is, at the very least, deliberately wasting my time. Before I get into that, I need to explain why the site reverted back to the very specific date of October 10th, 2023.

Above is an email that I have been receiving since October 11th from HostPapa, or the corporation they subcontract their VPS backup management to, Acronis. As part of the site’s plan, daily backups were made. Eventually, the site got too large for the 60 GB of space allocated for the backups, which is an entire issue unto itself, and they started failing. In order to “solve” this problem, they helpfully told me to upgrade to a site hosting package that cost over $4k for three years. I repeatedly said no. 

Then comes their Christmas surprise, where they inform me that their owners are none too pleased with me, and they won’t host the site any longer. I begin the process of finding a new host, and the site goes down. When I say “the site goes down,” I mean everything went down. The cPanel, the VPS management, everything. During this time I buy a new plan with a new host, and migrate the site.

Only to find out that it’s been reverted to the backup. 

There is no excuse for this. At no point in any of my emails with various HostPapa figures did they explain to me that they would be reverting my site to an out of date backup. There is no reason why anyone would have done this. They made it very clear that I had until the 29th to transfer my site, and then extended this date until January 2nd. However, they took it upon themselves to revert the site to a backup, for absolutely zero reason. 

It gets even more tedious. I repeatedly told HostPapa that the site was out of date, and that they had reverted it to an October 10th version. They “helpfully” sent me a backup of the cPanel that was 24.4 GBs in size, implying that it was up to date. It took me hours to download, but eventually I got it.

When talking to the new web host, they told me to upload the file to them, and they would figure it out. The first upload failed after 20 GBs, and hours of waiting, but the second upload worked. Only then did I realize that, you guessed it, HostPapa had sent me a backup of my cPanel from October 10th. Yes, that’s right. To solve the problem of the site being out of date, they sent me the same backup that they reverted to, then let me waste hours of my time figuring this out.

It was actually even more annoying than you might think. I hadn’t extracted the file, as it was quite large and I didn’t have enough space on my SSD. After my time had already been wasted I cleared space on my SSD and extracted the whole thing. It took me a while to navigate to homedir/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2023, where the relevant content was, and realize that there was nothing past October 9th, 2023, despite the other folders appearing to be modified on December 27th. 

I sent them some emails explaining the matter. After not receiving a quick reply, I called HostPapa support. In fairness, I received help within about a minute, and a support ticket was created where I again explained the problem with screenshots included. What happens now is anyone’s guess. This should be an easy fix for HostPapa, but it also shouldn’t have happened in the first place. 

Unimpressive does not begin to describe this behaviour. It is theoretically possible that a corporation as large as HostPapa could be this incompetent and careless. Considering that I got kicked by them for years old articles that violated their utterly opaque content violations guide – and right in the middle of the Christmas season – I find it unlikely. Whatever the case, I felt that I needed to write another article explaining the situation to you. 

That’s actually not even the end of the issues. Starting at 11 PM yesterday I started receiving, every thirty minutes, automated emails regarding the failure of the scheduler. The contents of said emails are pretty much unintelligible, and I think it’s an issue with the new host, since the new site has too many files for the hosting plan. That’s the kind of small issue that you expect when migrating hosts, but in the current situation it’s just one more confusing annoyance added on top of this disaster. There are a few other small issues of that nature, but I won’t waste your time detailing every little annoyance and hiccup along the way. 

All of this should be easily fixed. That there are three parties involved complicates things, but it should still be as easy as pressing a few buttons. Despite that, I can’t even pretend to have any reasonable guess as to when this all gets fixed. If HostPapa is being willfully incompetent, it could drag on for a very long time. If they simply made some honest mistakes, then it could be fixed in the next few hours. All I can do is keep you posted.