My client asked me to move their whole website to a new host in 24 hours with no backup

Last month I got a call at 9pm on a Friday. Client said their site was down. Asked me to migrate everything to a new host by Saturday night. No backup files. No login info for the old host. I stayed up till 2am digging through old emails to find the cPanel access. Ended up exporting the database through phpMyAdmin blind. Migrated 47 pages and 12 products manually. Charged them $400 for the rush. Never again without a signed backup agreement. Anyone else have a nightmare migration story?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_laura17d ago

$400 for that kind of work is honestly low. I had a client once hand me a flash drive with a single HTML file and said "that's the whole site." Turned out they had 200 product images stored on some random free hosting account nobody remembered the password to. Spent a whole weekend tracking down image URLs from cached pages. The worst part was when I finally got everything moved, the new host had a 50MB database limit and their old site had a 2GB database. Had to split it into chunks and rebuild half the tables from scratch in phpMyAdmin. Now I keep a prep sheet that every client signs before I touch anything. It lists exactly what files and access they need to provide. If they can't give it, I don't start. Saved me from three disasters in the past year.

wesley63917d ago

That prep sheet sounds like a lifesaver. Nothing like doing archaeology on a client's dead hosting account just to find some blurry JPEGs. At least now you get to say "sorry, no checklist, no work" and watch them scramble to find their cPanel login.