SoccerNet Live

Some of you must be wondering what happened to SoccerNet Live over the last couple of days.

Long story.. anyway, just to let you in on the hair pulling 36 hours which I had to endure with my web hosting company (godaddy). You see, I envisage a long term commitment to this soccer blog seeing a steady growth of readers over the last 2 months, so with this in mind, I shelled out some money and went ahead to purchase a new 2-year domain renewal and hosting plan in place of the monthly hosting.

I expect the system to be smart enough to let the 2-year web hosting plan (which godaddy prompt us to purchase together with the domain renewal) take immediate effect and void the current arrrangement once the payment is made. Apparently, when it comes to making extra money, the system has no qualms about acting dumb, and persists in deducting from my credit card the monthly hosting fee.

Well, when this issue came to my attention, I emailed the support staff and after waiting for 5 hours, the first reply came but was not helpful… or either I am too stupid, so I fired off another email and the to-and-fro works out to three emails in the end. That is 18 hours later, and I can say the matter was finally resolved.

The new hosting plan takes effect but all the data was lost. Once again, I turn to the pros for advice and this time, the solution came pretty quick but it requires me parting with more money.

Fortunately we can restore your hosting account that you canceled from up to 30 days ago. However it is an additional service, and there is a $150.00 restore fee.

If this is acceptable to you, please provide the following information:

The Customer Number that holds the hosting space.
The last 4 digits of the Credit Card on file for us to charge the fee to.
The precise date and time to restore the account to (up to 30 days back).
What specifically you would like restored, as in, Specific Directories, Databases, etc.
Where you would like the backup restored to, if you would like us to overwrite what is existing already, or if would like the restore placed into a directory in the account.
Any other information we may need to complete a restore for you.

Please let us know if we can help you in any other way.

This is definitely not acceptable, considering that only 30 days of data can be restored for a princely $150. I will have to think of other ways to recover all my previous posts or if anyone has any suggestion, I will be more than happy to hear it out.

Anyway, the case is now closed with godaddy and I hope this little saga has served as a useful lesson for bloggers out there. I wouldn’t blame godaddy as they have been professional enough to refund any outstanding fees and the fact that I have not backup my data over the weeks is also a negligence on my part.

All the posts up to this point of time are lost and I am scrambling to get this blog up and running again. I will try to compile back some of the previous posts in an archive but that will take time. Hopefully, at this time of crisis, my loyal readers will continue to support this blog. Subscribe to my feeds if you want as I will resume posting soon.

By the way, do you know of any person with such experience before? My main concern is to restore everything back as soon as possible. Please share and let me know how you deal with it.

I have to go to sleep now. Been a traumatizing day…

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