Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups • Hacker News Board

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#171

Post by ben509 » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

devit wrote: post #98

EnderMB wrote: post #28

Oof, this Twitter thread looks particularly bad, especially the response from the official Gandi account. https://twitter.com/andreaganduglia/status/12151991477012316... While I appreciate that there are real people behind these companies that are probably having a really rough time right now, the criticism that Gandi are getting as a company is justified - and if Gandi are truly a "no bullshit" company they need to…

I don't get the criticism. If they lost all the data, then obviously the only option for customers is to either use their own backups if they have them or accept that the data is permanently lost. One can criticize their lack of additional redundancy, but don't see what's wrong with the response.

The customers are being stupid and rude: assigning blame, asking redundant questions, making threats. Nothing in any of the twitter threads I've seen has any potential to solve any problems, they're yelling thinly veiled abuse at support.

The industry standard is sucking up to them and groveling, and it's led to customers being very badly behaved.

The trouble is no one has a good working alternative to the industry standard.

Gandi certainly doesn't, they're not responding in a well thought out manner, they're losing their cool and getting angry with their customers. That's a quick way to go out of business.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#172

Post by jdmguit » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

jolmg wrote: post #146

oefrha wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always an option. For instance, I use Linode’s backup service and it can only back up to the same data center (although it is said to live on a separate system).

They could mean using regular data transfer (i.e. using something like rsync instead of the provider's backup service). Maybe egress costs among servers from the same provider are reduced or nullified. From[1]: > Traffic over the private network does not count against your monthly quota. I wonder how private addresses are setup by Linode. [1] https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/billing-and-support/net...

Each data center has an internal private network with a pool of private IPs available for assignment. If a private IP is assigned to a server, it then has access to the private network.

https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/manager/remote-access/#...

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#173

Post by netule » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

aosaigh wrote: post #13

I don't have hosting with Gandi, but I do use them for domains and DNS. I'll be considering migrating my domains from them after this. Their response to this is exceptionally poor. To say essentially "this could happen to any other web host" it nonsense. I've never had this happen with any of the providers I've used for hosting and I'd be very angry if I had just lost an entire VPS. The fact that they've lost all sna…

I've been burnt several times now by smaller players claiming a higher degree of privacy that suddenly charge high fees, sell to a competitor, or sell my data. As of last month, I've moved my domains to Google. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#174

Post by craze3 » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

moralestapia wrote: post #87

Whoops, so long with the "no bullshit" policy. I stopped using them a while ago but for a different reason. I used to use their website to check availability/whois for domains that I was interested in buying. If it was available I didn't buy it at the time but until I finished the website/app whatever I was going to put there, this took me a few months obviously. It happened to me that when I was finally ready the do…

This happened to me with GoDaddy and Namecheap before, which is why I switched to using Gandi for all my domain searches... Now I'm regretting it!

But as @Jasper_ said, this could be a problem with the domain name registry selling/leaking that info (AKA all their 'is_available' queries), and not the registrar.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#175

Post by rhacker » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

binarysaurus wrote: post #156

EnderMB wrote: post #28

Oof, this Twitter thread looks particularly bad, especially the response from the official Gandi account. https://twitter.com/andreaganduglia/status/12151991477012316... While I appreciate that there are real people behind these companies that are probably having a really rough time right now, the criticism that Gandi are getting as a company is justified - and if Gandi are truly a "no bullshit" company they need to…

Julie Pelloille, responsible for comms, appears to be going a bit too far with this.

The Cersi thing is wrong on so many levels.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#176

Post by sct202 » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

jamesponddotco wrote: post #119

celticmusic wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an incident similar to this with linode, which is why I use and recommend Digital Ocean nowadays. My machine going away because you had hardware issues isn't my problem, and I'll spend my money on a more competent company.

When I worked at the WordPress hosting division of Copyblogger, we always had issues like these with Digital Ocean. They would email us saying that the node had a problem, and we had to recreate the server on our own. Good thing we only kept caching servers in Digital Ocean, so those were easily recreated, but that always kept me away from DO, personally. In fairness to them, though, DO do not claim to keep backup of…

DO has a service to automate backups. You can't download them or snapshots though, so you if you want a off-server copy you have to do it yourself.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#177

Post by ChikkaChiChi » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

totaldude87 wrote: post #50

shit happens...but the way their philosophy is fine tuned makes me wonder.. Above all, "no bullshit" is our golden rule—to treat our users how we want to be treated. It's a promise to respect your rights and to level with you about our shortcomings. https://www.gandi.net/en-US/no-bullshit ex: https://twitter.com/andreaganduglia/status/12151991477012316... (thanks op) We will listen to you, and be honest in our replie…

> We will listen to you, and be honest in our replies, even if it means you won’t always like what we say.

They are actively treating their customers like shit, and that tone starts at the top. No bullshit does not give creative license to be assholes to people that are panicked because of something you directly caused.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#178

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

alpaca128 wrote: post #66

kryogen1c wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is god damn unbelievable "Andrea, sorry about that and the incident. If we led you to believe that you had nothing to do on your side when warned multiple times to make your back ups, then we'll have to make it clearer, and stop assuming that it's an industry wide knowledge."

Big words for a company that's in trouble for not backing up data themselves.

Most web hosts have some courtesy backups, but it does sound like the Twitter user they're responding to fundamentally doesn't understand that snapshots aren't backups, and the screenshoted page explicitly states that the snapshots are for you to back up. Which he presumably did not do.

The idea that someone would entrust their sole copy(s) of critical business data to a service provider is insane to me. Always keep your own backups.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#179

Post by yingw787 » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

danr4 wrote: post #49

EnderMB wrote: post #28

Oof, this Twitter thread looks particularly bad, especially the response from the official Gandi account. https://twitter.com/andreaganduglia/status/12151991477012316... While I appreciate that there are real people behind these companies that are probably having a really rough time right now, the criticism that Gandi are getting as a company is justified - and if Gandi are truly a "no bullshit" company they need to…

Screenshotted in case (when) they delete it https://i.imgur.com/s3R1VVc.png Using memes after permanently losing customer data is extremely disrespectful.

...not losing data is the ONE thing I expect companies to get right. I could handle downtime, circular customer support, high prices, horrible UX, and all that. But losing or corrupting data? Heck no.

A company that loses customer data in production is the exact type I would expect to mock their customers using memes.

Re: Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups

#180

Post by pnathan » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

M2Ys4U wrote: post #131

TIL that gandi was bought by a private equity firm around a year ago.[0] This may explain some things... [0] https://news.gandi.net/en/2019/02/futureofgandi-the-adventur...

Interesting.

That's a very strange blogpost.