Backups of Hosting Accounts, Suspensions and Terminations

Genesis

Administrator
Staff member
Responsibility for Backup of Accounts
If you read Gigarank's TOS , it urges you to make regular backups of your hosting account, and for very good reason. Gigarank doesn't make backups of free web hosting accounts. (we do provide daily backups on paid hosting accounts) It is the responsibility of the owner of the hosting account to make backups.

Making backups is dead easy. All you need to do is click on backups in your cPanel Account, make a FULL backup, and then don't forget to SAVE that backup to the hard disk of you computer once the backup has been completed. You can also make individual backups of your databases, which is never a bad idea if your database is very large.

When you make backups note that this is made to your public folder, so once you have downloaded the backup to your hard disk you need to go into your public folder to delete the backup folder, as it will take up double space.

Suspension and Termination of Inactive Accounts
When an account is suspended it still exists, except you cannot access the account. The WHM directs all traffic to a page that says it has been suspended. So we can still make it available to you provided it doesn't contain any threats to the server or breaks any other TOS rules. Once an account has been terminated however it doesn't exist any longer. And unfortunately if you haven't made any backups of the account, it cannot be accessed ever again.

If you check the TOS it states that an account needs to use a minimum bandwidth every month in order to be considered an active account. A great way to show us that your account is active is to make posts in the forum from time to time. Not only does it show us you are active and interested in your account, but it also creates plenty of goodwill in your favour.

The owner of Gigarank places a high premium on the safety of the server for good reason. Inactive accounts attract spammers and hackers, and there is a zero tolerance for those at Gigarank. Hence why Gigarank has periodic cleanups when inactive accounts are identified, suspended and terminated. We also do spot checks outside the cleanup periods and have controls in place by our Technical Admin. We therefore urge you to check for major announcements that may affect your hosting account. Unless there are other reasons for suspending your account immediately, we provide ample time before we suspend and then terminate inactive accounts. This year it started with a PM in mid-August. Then an announcement with a suspension warning by end of August. And after that an announcement for termination that finally happened on 7 October.

Tutorial
Here is a tutorial for how to use the backup and restore feature of cPanel - note that Gigarank doesn't make backups of hosting accounts - it is the responsibility of the account holder to make regular backups:
[video=youtube]