Wordpress Site Deleted by Host: Advice needed to bounce back as efficiently as possible

BHW world,

Thank you in advance for all feedback. I mean it.

I just lost a #wordPress site with ~4k #e-commerce listings and 10 years of development effort and SEO juice. Please advise!

May you please advise on the following questions?

Recommendations and advice needed on/around:
1. Those with experience recovering lost service hosted data, may you please share a roadmate on how to recover data not back up, step by step
2. What are the best archiving solutions out there to salvage the latest copies of deleted site files from hosted servers?
3. Is seeking legal accountability a waste of time if not kindly recommend attorneys (US only) in the arena you might know or may have used
4. In order to avoid similar future problems, is self-hosting better than service hosting? Those in favour of #selfhosting, kindly recommend, tech, and specs for a modest #eCommerce site in newb speak, please


Back story:

I use a renowned host service owned by a certain individual with the name initials IT on Wikipedia, Bulgarian I believe.

Ten years worth of site development work was deleted from the #hosting servers due to "non-payment" by the click of a mouse/automation. Considering I have another paid hosting package on this service which is active as of this post, under the same dashboard and credentials until 2023 and have been a client for 7-10 years, I find their actions quite rude.

It is important to mention that in the past when payment forms expired, were declined, lost, or for whatever reason did not go through, the service was simply suspended. Digital resources simply could not be reached online and that's it! That was the worst problem.
This time, they deleted ALL the digital resources......development, graphic design work, SEO campaigns and juice, site designs, etc gone!

IT's policy via his customer service briefly summarized:
- "we delete unpaid services after 30 days of non-payment"
- "we do not keep copies of hosted data and therefore cannot retroactively restore your data from last known copies"

All feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Again thank you!

@BassTrackerBoats or mod bann me i dobt want to login again
@davids355

you don't any older backup somewhere?

Moschoutis said:

you don't any older backup somewhere?

Click to expand...

Yes, but from 2017. There are many updates after

so your host is in bulgaria. you failed to pay your hosting invoice for over 30d. therefore the data got terminated and no backup. there's nothing to litigate here. just because youre an old customer doesnt mean anything to a web host. that deletion system is likely automated on their end.

-keeping backups is your responsibility. many threads come up on bhw "i lost my site due to no backups". seriously keep backups. WP has ton of extensions to automate this. so do server panels
-best bet to recover is access your site on https://web.archive.org/ and piece it together best you can. no guarantee there is a recent archive.
-regarding servers/new host you have hundreds of vendors to choose from: bluehost hostwinds linode ovh hetzner etc. many recommendations on bhw and threads in marketplace selling their own. generally you are just comparing hardware against dollars. and support if you use it. generally WP is resource heavy and if the website is slow on your new server, upgrade to the next expensive tier within reason.

you still own the domain (i hope). not all is lost. find a new server, install WP, start rebuilding. you can come back from all of this.

uncutu said:

so your host is in bulgaria.

Click to expand...

No server host is in US as well.

Thanks for the feedback and tips.