Zarconia-Boonex Changes - part 2

This is seriously worrying and illustrates my statement earlier in this thread that Andrew had no regard for those of us that rely on our sites for our income. For your server to be unreachable and for you not to have had a response for a priority one ticket is nothing short of a breach of contract. 

I have been lucky enough to have had a response to my open tickets with Zarconia. Not to resolve them but suggesting that I should take out contacts with other suppliers recommending very costly solutions that quite frankly are totally unsuitable. 

Andrew, you must resolve this ridiculous situation fast. If we start losing our sites, we will see you in court. This is not something any of us want but if you continue to ignore your customers and we lose our sites this is exactly what will happen.

I find all of this frightening and amazing. My colleague and I both had accounts with Zarconia which amounted to 6 or 7 sites in all. A few months prior to this fiasco I moved the lot over Digital Ocean. Everything runs flawlessly on a $10 per month VPS droplet. I won't go into how many organisations we share the VPS with, but I did say all is working flawlessly.

I'd hate to think where we'd be if we got caught up in this mess. Losing a site with only a few members is bad enough, but to lose hundreds, if not thousands is negligence on behalf of the person who pulled the fuse.

Keep in mind that it's important to backup. However, if you were paying for backups there would be a legal issue. You probably won't get your site back, nor any money for that matter. Therefore, before you do anything, make sure the person or company you're challenging is solvent.

Setting up a sever of your own does require some work and it may not be something a lot of you would care to do. Thus I would get someone (not me) to set up a server and control panel to make life easy. Once done, you should be on your way, but you may care to keep your helper in the wings just in case. I use Sentora which isn't as fancy as cPanel, but it's relatively easy to use. I have four sites with their own web masters and each can access his/her Sentora panel individually. I can set limits on bandwidth, storage, databases etc, so it's good for all of us.

Although Digital Ocean suggest that one's bandwidth is limited with the cheaper "droplet", they have some kind of pooling system where unused bandwidth is shared. We seem to be getting 10 times more than we pay for.

If you want a personalised service, you won't get it from Digital Ocean. They don't offer a helping hand, but their forum and Wiki are both great. Other than that, consider the people promoting their services here. GeekGirl for example is keen to help.

I had paid an annual plan in advance.

Nathan's closure announcement was made between him receiving my payment and the commencement of the annual term. As the term had not started I requested a refund.

That was refused. 

Then came the update.

My understanding of Nathan's message

"we'll be able to continue meeting the hosting and support needs of our customers.

What does this mean for current customers? You will no longer need to find alternative hosting"

was that I need take no action, service would continue as usual.

Last Friday, Zarconia ... Boonex ... who ever, terminated my site.

I think someone needs to be far more transparent about this. While I was with Zarconia I checked who I was sharing the server with. I can't remember names, but there was something like 60 sites. My colleague was on a different server with slightly more sites - 65 if I recall. That's 120 sites on two servers, not counting all the VPS servers and any other budget servers Zarconia may have had.

Let's say each customer had an average of two sites, that 65 customers on the budget servers alone who had the rug pulled from under them. I smell a rat. Everything was too hasty and very unprofessional. It seemed as if nobody cared. Let's be honest, moving from Zarconia to Digital Ocean took me a month to set everything up properly. It could be done much quicker, but I wanted to get everything right before the final switch. Plus I had several sites to move. Zarconia never gave people enough time and I thought it was most unusual for Nathan to (a) want people to move quickly and (b) not to meet his financial commitments. At the very worst, he should have backed up everything and offered copies to any client who needed them - even for a fee.

Nathan, if you're reading this can you please let everyone know how and why the wheels fell off. If it was something Boonex did, please don't be afraid to say so. I don't think Boonex has many friends on this forum at present, but in all honesty, nobody can morally take people's money for payment in advance and not refund it. In Australia you'd end up in jail.

I was with Zarconia for a short period of time a while back.

When I was with them, they were Reselling Hosting from ServerLoft, so eventually I just ended up getting my own Dedicated Server directly from ServerLoft for about 1/2 the money per month and just managing it myself.

If your Zarconia DNS Servers were set to NS1.NAMESERVERSERVICE.COM and NS2.NAMESERVERSERVICE.COM then you were actually with ServerLoft.

Another division of the same company is Server4You, which also uses the same DNS Servers I believe but is like a lower level of Hosting. They may have also been reselling theirs as well.

hi guys, i lost all of my years of hard work as zarconi vanished with no trace.

i had been paying but my accounts terminated and now they took money auto mode

i had more than 30 websites running and i had been paying for plesk unlimited licence as well

can anyone help

i had spent so much money to get my websites made using boonex and also paid for many plugins.

kind of nightmare ..

i now hate boonex and so nathan for making me go sleepless since past 3 -4 weeks

my sites like godesi.com which had so much date vanished and so many more

and many more vanished and stupid of me, i have no backsups.

how stupid of me

 Hi, I hope it solves for you and everyone else who has gotten their sites shut down by a bad webhosting. A couple of years ago, I warned everyone to take Zarkonia. But then everyone screamed at me that Nathan and Zarkonia were so good and you could trust them. Even a few years ago, Zarkonia made a bad start when they started there webhotell by crashing one of their hard drives where they had many customers. No back up they had. I tried to explain to many here at Boonex that Zarkonia is only reseller in major web hosting companies and they sold their services and that you could get cheaper and better security by purchasing web hosting directly from a trusted web host instead.

If anyone needs help with the current Zarconia mess then please send me a PM.  I can help with setting up a server or moving sites to a server.

To be fair to Zarconia, you have to realise that you were paying for the management of the server, Dolphin issues, etc.

I can't believe that people are still having their sites erased and tickets not answered.  Boonex, why haven't you set up some telephone numbers for people to call to reach a human being and not just emails?  Boonex, pay me a decent fee and I will start handling the support for Zarconia.

Unfortunately, due to over a month payment delay, your server was marked for cancellation and then terminated.

If we still have your server backup, we will provide it to you.

We will let you know about the backup presence or absence.

 I will make one comment on this given my Open Letter to Andrew Boon publish here on the forum moments ago.  I do not profess to know the details of my friends payments to Zarconia but what I will say is that all recurring payments were cancelled when Zarconia announced its closure.  Those of us paying monthly up until this point may have expected this to carry on given Boonex's eleventh hour saviour.  However it was then impossible make payment for almost a week due to an incorrectly configured PayPal gateway.  No other means of payment where given.  

I opened a ticket as soon as I realised this issue.  I have to date not received a reply.  Also it should be noted that in no update is made to a ticket in 168 its is automatically closed.

This story is being repeated over and over.  Zarconia did not handle this correctly and with Boonex taking over it has just compounded the mess.  Nathan needs to come in to the forums and answer questions as well.  I was under the impression that Nathan was helping Boonex handle things.  There is no reason that people should have lost their sites if things had been handled correctly.

Boonex, I suggest you stop terminating servers even if you have to pay for them out of pocket because I have a feeling you are facing a very serious legal mess.

People need to reach someone, a human, by telephone, so there can be proper communications.  Evidently the ticket system is broken and that was not properly conveyed.  And Boonex's email support has been known for years to not be a reliable way to reach Boonex support; Andrew Boon, don't pretend otherwise.

Many servers were marked for cancellation before we acquired Zarconia.

The Zarconia server management is still new to us, but we understood one thing: that we never should terminate a server before we handle out the server backup to the customer. As soon as we still don't have access to the server backups, we will not terminate servers anymore. We would rather shut them down if the customer does not reply to our requests. The experience proves that after such actions, the customer eventually shows up :-)

I have replied to all tickets today at Zarconia and I will keep on doing the same every day :-)

Sorry for the mess you mentioned...

I just need to chime in that my databases worth of 5 years data have gone, unrecoverable. 

They terminated my account for non-payment or something like that due to the change of ownership and shit like that. 

What the hell is wrong with backing up databases less then 1GB ? I can understand the files are big but databases are not that big to back up.  

Your database/site may still be recoverable.  I was under the impression that Nathan was doing off server backups of accounts after the server crash that resulted in clients losing their sites.  Put in a request at support@boonex.com and see what they can find on the backup server.

 last week I was told "is already terminated and there are no backups for it.".

 Yes, but Boonex was confused on the backup server.  Perhaps they just didn't know at the time.

 What is your user name at Zarconia?

I think I have found it.

Your servers were terminated automatically. Maybe Nathan marked them for termination.

I also searched for your backups on the shared server and didn't find them.

Yes, it's bad news but if we could we would definitely help.

It may be bad news for Boonex if the lawsuits over this start coming in.   have you consulted an attorney yet?

 hi after my sites vanishes, I did seen my sites live for a day or two and then they vanished .

can you please check as seems like someone tried to activate database.

my id is iff2in

Please check for once.

See if something cna be recovered

My advice is to contact an attorney and sue Boonex.  This is just unaceptable.  They have screwed so many over this whole Zarconia debacle and sue Nathan as well because he handle it poorly as well.  The letter he sent out was contradictory.

The hosting provider confirmed that your server was formatted and no data is recoverable.

We can offer reinstallation of your site with all the modules that you bought on BoonEx Market.

We can discuss this using Zarconia ticket system or UNA tickets.

You offer nothing.  You do realise that the person can sure for the lost of revenue caused by deletion of their site and lost of their client base?

Look, Geek Girl, I don’t understand why do you have to keep rubbishing us so consistently? We are trying to help and took over zarconia servers to support people that werent getting any response from Nathan and couldn‘t act on moving their sites so quickly. There were some servers scheduled for deletion in WHMCS due to non payment. Same with our own deletions - they automatically happen due do non-payment after ace period.

There are some odd cases which are difficult to predict and unfortunately we don’t have any feedback or communication with Nathan to understand some of them fully. We are trying to do everything possible to prevent any loss or distruption. Now 3 techs are working on it and we do what we can. 

Nathan sent the first message without consulting with us and the second message was according to how we could best understand the situation assuming that cancellations and backups are all adrquatly synchronised via WHMCS. Now, we are trying tolocate any osd cases and stopped all unclear cancellations as soon as we could. 

This debacle Started from an unfortunate personal problem and we doing everything we possible can, with our understanding, to make it less damaging. 

whats up wit all this fussing about zarconia?!? they are surly not the only hosting option available.. I was a client of Z for some time, and have no complaints, but I switched just before all this drama...

regarding hosting, one great option to consider is Googles Could Platform, they offer 300$ free cloud services if you just verify a card while signing up, and ...(its actually possible to do this multiple times, but with a bit of caution of course, they do not permit using multiple accounts for this offer, but it possible to have at least a few simultaneously, if your a bit creative minded and not stupid about it and don't use they service for crazy spamming/hacking/other illegal stuffs..  let's just say "my friend" has already used at 3 now, currently on the 4th without any problem. 

there are many other good affordable options like digital ocean and others, it's all depending on your needs, budget and traffic volume, but my suggestion for anyone who's looking for a new hosting solution... TRY GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM..!! you will learn a lot of valuable knowledge and free 300$ bucks is always welcome, and their support is actually really good. you're not obligated in any way to continue subscription after your 300 is used, so give it a try if your not completely retarded, always look forward and think positive, not backwards.!!

best of luck you ya'll, but honestly its not about luck, its about your motivation and remember, failure is not a option !!  

Thank you, adultdate! Very good advice. 

Also, consider that if you’re setting up a startup you may be eligible for Amazon startup credits and get up to $5000 worth of prepaid hosting, especially if you’re incorporating viansomethingnliek Stripe Atlas. There are many options. For us hosting was always just a way to make the product more accessible. Otherwise we always prefer if you research and take up your own hosting. 

Hi,

Only this morning I was recommending someone who had previously lost their database of users at a platform called Ning, to join Zarconia.

Even after reading this discussion, I still would recommend Zarconia to new clients. For three reasons.

1. Everything's integrated. I hate to say this, but people who put all their eggs in one basket, can be turned away legally due to this. Cpanel offers backups, and I would suggest you take clear advantage of them. I do this daily on my own dedicated server and have been able to restore my site numerous times this way. In fact, that's what I dedicated my own personal in house hard drive to is backups of content and members. On the entire database and files.zip folder and file structure on a  daily basis.

On a more personal note, if you got email notifications of new users pending approval, you could always manually find all instances of those emails through the emails you've received over the years if the email itself is contained within it. As admins, you are also able to point your existing domain to a site explaining the problem and offering access to your site via archive.org so people can browse a read only archive of your site. Unlike regular web hosting, that site is free for everyone to use, publicly. If your site was private, at least you can use it to compare how your new site will look once you rebuild.

2. It's not just you. Through completely different circumstances, I've been fighting an uphill battle with content loss for years now since the beginning of 2015. I've used other platforms besides Dolphin. Including PHPFox, Social Engine, Ning, Oxwall, Word Press, and combinations of them among others. You know what I've found? Users care most about connecting with the members of the community. All the posts that were once written, are still in memory of the members who wrote them. Even you. Domains are how people found your site for years. And unlike web hosting, they can be recycled again and again. If you ever need to regroup, do it sooner rather than later. Those who truly remember your community, shall return and will love the chance to get more personally involved with what you originally set out to build. Before the membership numbers of all you created got to be an objective you got used to seeing, rather than individual faces.

3. My takeaway from this, is that yes I've found a web hosting company that will never do me wrong. I've always paid on time and Name Cheap has always given me a few hours notice minimum up to a few days notice maximum when I had to pay again. If you respond within that time frame, I've found they do make exceptions. There wasn't a query they couldn't help me solve, and with the right support plan, they'll even include free custom installs if you provide them the help files to follow. That plus I never had my domains taken from me made me choose them when practically every other hosting provider, including Zarconia that I've tried in the past, has failed me. Zarconia in my particular case, because I didn't have enough money at the time to pay for a dedicated instance.

Personally, I know that Boonex uses OVH for their hosting provider. On a Nginx setup. This means, they run their own hosting team, but use a data center known for the worst and most complex billing structure of its kind in my opinion. Same with In Motion Hosting, Host Iso, Linnode, Ramnode, Fast Comet, etc, they all have their problems. From over priced, to unusable management as in the case with Host Gator, to rough goes at transfership and yes I've even had database corruption errors due to old outdated hardware setups on Arvixe, Bluehost and Godaddy not to mention host upon, 000webhost. I've been there, done that, seen a lot, know a little, and have no doubt that Zarconia is not the host for me. But, I recommended it to someone who needs it for their use case and I did so because I know, with the right setup requirements, Druanna will find that Zarconia does offer an excellent value and package. Even if you use them for a month, decide to migrate elsewhere once everything's all set up, or you used them for years and are facing a problem or crossroads, you still got excellent use out of Zarconia. I know I did, and whatever Nathan has done in terms of a disagreement with Boonex, I'm sure that it doesn't merit a bashing of his character to try to overlook the good things he's done for everyone.

Personal issues aside however, I'll always be a Name Cheap fan and with that now said, there's something else I want to point out. Something you guys have overlooked.

It's one thing to lose a backup of the things other people have posted. But it's quite another to believe you've lost a backup of what you've contributed to. How many of you, have lost everything? And when I say everything, I am including domain, email, everything done in house? If you're effected by this change, to get your data back, you may be able to prepare for this in future by updating your billing date. Normally when a web server is terminated in a data center, the hard drives contained within it may be reformatted. But formatting tools exist within all hard drives to recover all data lost to the indexing files stored on them. If you trust your data center, or have access to the drives where your content was stored, you may be able to recover all the data belonging to you this way. As the server you've used in part, can be used again by others. Especially if it is a dedicated server. Most companies actually use dedicated drives for this purpose. If you know where to look, and if you can get the company to perform a deep folder scan, maybe you can recover, within a maximum of 3 months or so hot file regular access storage capacity, all files with a 99% recovery option. This may break dolphin, but your database may still be intact if not all the files are listed in the index. You can always replace them if they are unreadable. but that is an option, since the master hosting company Boonex uses can't prove the server wouldn't eventually be paid within the time limit specified by the person taking responsibility. Which is stilll OVH, not Boonex or Zarconia as it's their datacenter still in operation.

I've personally recovered a website backup this way using a tool of this nature with a success rate of about 92%. I hope this helps you. Given that it's been around about a month since this incident occurred, it's worth a shot. Beg if you have to, file a lawsuit if the hosting provider refuses to do this. It is still not too late. That's how computer criminal evidence is uncovered in police investigations and cold cases.

Thank you. Some great info and suggestions, Elshara!

We are talking  to the datacenter to the datacenter people trying to recover whatever possible. 

As for Nathan - we didn’t have any disagreements. On the contrary, we were trying to help in every way possible - he’s been avsolutely great for many years and we owe him a great deal. 

 any luck to recover lost/deleted data, boss?

My database is only about 245 Mb in size. 

You're welcome. I hope it's all coming to a head now so to speak and you're getting the answers you need. In case they need a little persuasion, I'd suggest bringing up the fact that you're a reseller of their services. By trade, those who are responsible for keeping servers up to date in a chain of command situation such as reselling, is between soley the people who keep the server online, and their managers. You're a server manager, which means you have every right to fight for the access to the servers that you helped to keep going all these years. It also means that clients under Zarconia's leadership aren't responsible for their data loss. And neither are you. It's your data centers responsibility to check hidden index files of their drives in an attempt to recover lost client data. Which, if the law got involved, would be a beyond reasonable doubt security check clause that will protect you from lawsuits, and your data center, if such checks were performed and the proof provided. A short video with a series of screenshots should suffice in this case if the worst ever came down to the worst in such a situation.

As for Nathan, I hope he's doing okay. Him and a lot of other developers including you have really made a difference here. I hope we continue to see each other working together on both platforms to make our dreams come to life. Una is new, in development and Dolphin is mature, in steady progress. both have their perks. Both make people stay connected. Continuing such a legacy is all our hopes and dreams combined into one purpose, one goal. No matter what we gain or lose through this experience, we win the hearts of those who care as our sites become the portal to making good times possible. that's what's most important here. That's why I am proud to stay with Boonex. And that's why each and every one of you are passionate for everything that you do. We're in this together, traveling the road to success one site at a time.

Remember. It takes more than a reason to say at the end of the day, I'm here for you. It takes a reason not to care, for anyone to actually follow through with leaving for good. Finding that even the worst complainers on the forum here have a lack of showing their apethy towards this goal, is in fact, the first step towards healing bridges touching flames of uncertainty. No matter what, if you have a reason and a passion to do something, make it a priority to let others know you aren't giving up on those who respond to it. that's where true life can make itself a home in anything you build through all our efforts as a collective.

I agree wholeheartedly. Taking on the reseller hosting management took as far out of our comfort zone, but relabeled a lot of important insight. That includes rethinking some of the DolphinPro-related plans and approach to Boonex clients support. Over the next two-three weeks we’ll be able regroup and reassess the strategy. 

The dat-loss issue is complicated as every single case is a bit different. Every time it’s triggerred by either non-payment or refund claim, which then alerts WHMCS and goes up to datacenter, but in some cases the non-payment or A refund should be processed differently and that’s something we have to be controlling with vigilance. There’s a learning curve to it as well, but we are getting better at it every day. 

Andrew Boon Said:

One approach you could take to rectifying this problem, is quit being the middleman. Now that you're taking on hosting full time, purchase a few computers, and run them out of your own office. If you even get a colocation plan, you'd have physical access to your servers any time you want with the same benefits of a dedicated instance at a data center. So you'd get the same protections, at a more affordable cost with data you ultimately own. Payment plans can always be edited, and with WHMCS, the removal of accounts can be set so that you just suspend account access, instead of deleting information like what your data center hosting provider does currently. By providing a fake 404 page, the non paying and refund clients can still retain their sites as a server backup provided by you of their data. this eliminates you from all legal issues the second they end their contract. And you'd have control over everything every step of the way. Only once the person has their data off your colocated servers for good, can you remove it permanently. It's a set it and forget it solution which works better for you than what most companies provide, even managed ones.

Another advantage to colocation is that you can use different data centers in different countries in case your single data center experiences a power outage. If you have or are considering hiring employees working for you in different cities even, this would or could be a performance gain. It would essentially be a managed CDN and web server business all in one. where everything's done in house.

In terms of plans, what might work out best for you, is offer shared, vps and dedicated hosting through a cloud infrastructure. this way a server in the cloud is a dedicated instance, but it's all done through VPS resource delegations. When ever a client wants a dedicated instance, they can choose whether they want their data hosted with you, or with another company. If they pick another company, partner with another service that offers dedicated hosting, and let clients pay you so you can buy the server, and manage it, even though it's hosted outside the Boonex controlled data centers. this leaves shared hosting clients more resources to grow and scale, until you delegate their hosting requirements to an off site hosting provider where the customer and you are on the lease together. The agreement would be ultimately in that customers name, however outsourcing the servers saves you from needing to buy new ones accept for when shared hosting and vps clients require it through the cloud. A cloud you ultimately control. for big data sites, you can still offer the same data protection by simply backing up customers data for a fee. That fee goes to a separate server you control under your protection that you buy when the customer gives you their details for the server they pay for so that you can go in as support techs and fix whatever issues they have. You could set up a monitoring script on the server outside the Boonex Colocated servers that detects when ever that customers server is in fact down, to trigger the archival process of their data on the server you control. doing so daily ensures that this is an automated data and security protection risk that ultimately, protects customers data sets, in cold as well as hot storage, and should the customer need it again, they have it emailed to them in a file you keep for a maximum of a specified time limit. this means that after that date, you hold no responsibility. A month should suffice, but some use 3 months, others a year. The end all be all is that you don't need to worry about data loss, while saving cpu and ram resources for clients who need it most.

Hello.

I suggest you open a ticket at Zarconia with your website info (URL, service ID if you know it).

We now have access to the backups, but as soon as you had several services at Zarconia, I need your specification which backup to search for.

hi, my hosting account with zarconia which ends mid june, what is happening after that time? and re dolphin permanent lic is this interchangeable with una?

I have sent emails to support at UNA and boonex no reply so far, re: my lic on dolphin what is happening in regards to migration to una and is it interchangeable with una etc if any one knows?

 Hello. If you have a permanent Dolphin license, it can be converted into UNA Pro license (lifetime).

If you don't plan to keep your Zarconia server after the expiration date, you can request server backup and cancellation using Zarconia ticket system or by emailing support@boonex.com

I could not find your support tickets at boonex, so please send again and provide the link to this topic so we could identify you.

i will create a support ticket, i used the contact form before. 

Ticket Created #901647

 The ticket has been answered.