A few  weeks ago, I signed up with WebFaction. I read nothing but the good things about them all over the Internet. So I bought a “Shared 1″ plan and setup a pair of blogs for this domain. One for Turkish articles and one for English. It was a very good experience. Control panel is very easy and in a few clicks you get your application ready and running. I have post a few articles and then went out to Ankara Gazi University for a Turkish Archery Workshop.

It was all gone when I get back from the workshop. When I try to open my blog I get 504 time out errors from nginx. I’ve login to my accound with SSH and check for my WordPress applications and I’ve stunned; there was no WordPress directories. After I’ve try to determine the reason for a while I’ve headed to the WebFaction status blog and I’ve found that the server, which my account is on, had a filesystem error and it was recovered from yesterday’s backup. That was a relief. I thought there is some glitches with the recovery process and all will be fixed soon.

After that, I have login to support center and filed a ticket for my missing applications. After a long wait and a poke to the user forum I get my answer and stunned again. They say that there was a bug with their backup script and my applications can not be recovered. They also mentioned that they encoure their users to maintain independent backups. Ok, I work as a software developer, I can understand that scripts and codes and hardware can be buggy. But why do you keep your users uninformed about the loss of data? Why do you not mention that critical bug in your status blog? That’s not how a responsible hosting firm should act.

I’ve canceled my account because of this, but please WebFaction, do not hide information from your users in the future. You were the best host I’ve signed up with until this circumstance.