I was alerted by a user today that a redirect was not working on my site. I went to CPanel to investigate only to find that all of my redirects AND subdomains are gone.
I contacted Live Chat and was told to submit a trouble ticket.
I submitted the ticket stating that these were missing and could they be reinstated... and quickly received a reply. Unfortunately, the reply simply confirmed that yes, I have no subdomains or redirects and that I could set them up in CPanel. (um, yeah, I know where to set them up... I had them set up, and want to know why they are gone)
I replied to the response, admittedly a bit frustrated by the sense that tech support read the nouns in my request and sent a canned response rather than reading for content. I asked why the subdomains and redirects are gone, since I do not want to have this happen again. I am scouring my backups for some hint of what all was lost since I do not know by memory for whom I set these up, but am having no success.
The second response was essentially a paraphrasing of the first response. They checked, there are indeed none there, and I can recreate them.
I would feel more comfortable had tech support acknowledged that I have lost information on their service and some suggestion as to why it happened, what I could do to prevent it happening again, or where in my full backup I could find a list of the subdomains and redirects I had, in order to recreate them. (I admit, I became too frustrated to reopen the ticket to ask specifically where in my backup the CPanel information needed might reside.)
I recognize that quick tech support often requires canned answers to resolve what are all too often "user error" issues on first pass, but I do not believe this is a user error, and I an concerned that things are getting deleted. This makes me worry for the stability of my site. I do not know if anything else has been deleted, or if there is any way to rebuild the missing information from a backup.
The issue is not that I have to recreate these features. I will do so. It only takes a moment for each one, but since I do not have a list of what was there, I must send out a request to my users to notify me if they are missing a custom address. This is embarrassing and makes me and TotalChoiceHosting look bad.
Has anyone encountered this problem? (the lost setups, or unhelpful tech support?) Does anyone know where the subdomains and redirects are saved in the full backup? (cron jobs too?)
Thanks for any guidance.