Copied from r/sysadmin

While not work related, I am absolutely livid with how SkySilk mishandled things for a VPS that I was paying for to host a wordpress backed website for a non-profit cosplay group that I am the manager for.

I got a notification earlier today that the google business listing for the group had been suspended and needed to be fixed and resubmitted to become active again.

After a bit of thinking about what could have happened, I discovered that the website was down. I logged into the SkySilk VPS portal to discover that the VPS was gone.

I submitted a ticket to SkySilk asking for help with this thinking that someone had hacked my account and deleted the VPS.

I get a response from SkySilk Support to this effect

Hello,

We’ve been doing maintenance and upgrades across our datacenters these past few weeks, unfortunately as a result we’ve had to begin the process of decommissioning older hardware and inactive freebie machines from our beta days as they are no longer compatible with our current iteration of the hosting infrastructure. At some point during the process on June 9th your machine was put into a soft-deleted state to allow active users to reach out to us prior to the machine being permanently removed. As there was no response to the action, the system performed the next stages of the decommission process which results in a destroyed state days later (June 12th).

While this may have been a free machine dating back from our beta days, we understand that this can be an unfortunate situation. Though recovery of the machine is not possible, your account has been credited $20 to use as you see fit.

Thankfully if you have maintained some level of backup for your machine on a local basis, you’ll be able to upload that data to a new machine. While our platform does offer a back-up system we always strongly recommend following the “3-2-1” backup method to prevent any data loss.

Regards,

Stefano M.

SkySilk Cloud

This was not a “Free” VPS, while it was not an expensive one, as I only paid two dollars and fifty cents a month for it, it was not a free VPS.

I was out of the country on a 7-day cruise last week, and also because of the nature of the website I ran on this VPS I didn’t check it every day to see if it was up, and while I did have internet access on the cruise, I was on vacation so I wouldn’t have been checking stuff like that anyways, the only things I was doing was monitoring my work email in case there were any issues and my co-workers needed questions answered, and my personal usage for facebook, etc.

I could care less about that twenty-dollar credit, if they can’t bring my VPS back online I am done with doing business with this company.

I wouldn’t trust them to host anything for our company, and wanted to make sure others have visibility on how they treat their customers.

I do have a backup I can restore, but it won’t be with these guys when it gets set back up