Avoid Omnis hosting

[madicomputers]

We hosted one of our site with Omnis. To spare you the drudgery of our awful relationship with them, I'll simply paste the email sent to all users earlier today:

Dear Customer:

We experienced a failure of the RAID storage system in the new MySQL server that went online in November. The RAID is a redundant array of discs used to house the data for your MySQL database. Ordinarily recovery from this type of failure would be simply a matter of restoring data from our daily backups onto a new RAID. However, because of another glitch in the system that takes daily dumps from the MySQL server the most recent backup we have of your database is from November 2, 2004. We have restored the data to your MySQL database from the November 2nd backup. If you enabled MySQL or created your database structure after November 2nd, you will need to recreate your tables.

We have repaired the bug preventing the database dumps and will be repairing the RAID in the MySQL server. We understand that you depend on your MySQL database for operation of your web site and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused by this failure. I am personally reviewing all of our procedures to look for glitches or holes in critical systems such as database backups. I can assure you that we are taking action to prevent such failures in the future.

Again, we sincerely apologize for this failure and our lack of adequate system administration. We are prepared to issue a credit on your account to compensate for this error. If you lost data please contact me directly to receive a credit. You may also contact me directly if you have any other questions or comments.

Phone: 877-393-4678 ext 205
Email: fromm@omnis.com

Thank you,
James Fromm
Vice President, Operations
Omnis Network, LLC

[cyanide]

Sorry to hear about that.

Unfortunately, with the huge space + cheap price, it's really not a big surprise, IMO

[madicomputers]

I clicked through to your hosting site. Frankly it looks very similar in terms of price and services. ;) How does the time-constrained small business owner differentiate between the good and bad?

[Easywebdev]

Originally Posted by madicomputers

Frankly it looks very similar in terms of price and services.

There is a world of difference between both sets of prices and services. Omnis are offering almost 100 times the space and bandwidth for the same price.

I've been in the hosting industry a long time and I can tell you that one look at omnis's offer would have me reaching for the back button. They are blatantly overselling.

Cyanide's site looks like a much more realistic offer on rock solid hardware.

Now, that aside lets get back to your original post.

Originally Posted by Omnis terms of service

Client-maintained backup of all site files is recommended and should be maintained outside of Omnis Network's facilities. System backups are intended to be used in the event of system failures and are not intended to be accessed to restore files to individual sites. A fee of $100 is applicable should a client require any files from our backup systems. We cannot guarantee that the files contained in our backup systems will be the most current copies available for a given site.

Maintaining regular backups is clearly the responsibility of the client. I don't really think you should be grumbling in this instance.

Disasters happen in webhosting, hard drives fail, partitions corrupt and data gets lost. If you are running a mission critical site then you should be using some offsite automated backup or at least downloading backups to your own computer daily.

Omnis' pricing would keep me away from them if I needed hosting but I will say that they seem to have handled this well in at least restoring a backup (not the most up to date albeit, but better than nothing) and offering a credit for the inconvenience.

[No Clue]

how about 1and1.com ?
I'm hosting all of my websites with them and their service and prices are really good. plus excellent 24 hour phone support. avoid using yahoo hosting.