{"id":149,"date":"2026-05-29T11:17:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T11:17:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biblophile.com\/blog\/?p=149"},"modified":"2026-05-29T11:17:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T11:17:11","slug":"an-important-update-on-a-recent-data-loss-incident","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblophile.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/29\/an-important-update-on-a-recent-data-loss-incident\/","title":{"rendered":"An important update on a recent data-loss incident"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A few days ago, some recent user activity on Biblophile was lost due to a hosting failure. The root cause was corruption at the hosting provider level, which affected application data written during the impacted window. Similar public incident responses by companies like Zomato have shown that being direct and transparent is the only acceptable way to communicate when user trust is involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post explains what happened, what was affected, what has already changed, and what lessons came out of the incident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What happened<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The issue was caused by Hostliger<\/a>, the hosting provider used at the time. Their infrastructure failure led to corrupted data, and as a result, a portion of recent user activity was lost before it could be reliably recovered. The exact internal failure happened outside the application layer, but the outcome was still real for users: recent activity disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That distinction matters internally, but not to users. If a platform loses user activity, the responsibility still sits with the product. That is the standard set by transparent incident writeups such as Zomato\u2019s 2017 security response, where the company publicly acknowledged the issue, clarified impact, and described immediate remediation steps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was affected<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The impact was limited to a recent time window rather than the entire product history. Older data remained intact, but some new activity from the affected period was deleted or became unavailable because of the corruption event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this time, the known impact is on recent user activity and related application data created during that period. There is no reason to overstate this beyond the actual scope, but it would also be wrong to soften it: data that users expected to be there is no longer there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where the mistake really was<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The immediate trigger came from the hosting provider, but the bigger lesson is about infrastructure choices. This incident is a reminder that hosting providers should be vetted far more rigorously than most early products tend to do, especially on backup policy, recovery guarantees, incident transparency, and support quality. Industry backup guidance consistently recommends automated backups, multiple backup copies, and at least one off-site copy on a different platform precisely to avoid a single provider becoming a single point of failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That standard was not strong enough before this incident. Relying too much on one provider, even when it appears operationally convenient, creates risk that only becomes obvious after something breaks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What has changed already<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Two concrete remedies have already been put in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  • The product has been moved away from Hostliger to a more reliable hosting provider.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Daily backups are now being maintained on a different platform, creating an additional off-site safety net instead of keeping recovery dependent on the same vendor.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n

    These changes align with standard disaster-recovery practice: keep automated backups, maintain multiple copies, and store at least one copy off-site on separate infrastructure so a single vendor incident cannot take both the live system and the backup path down together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    What this means going forward<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    Trust is not protected by saying the right words after an incident. It is protected by changing the system so the same class of failure is much less likely to happen again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    That means infrastructure decisions will now be treated as product decisions. Vendor reliability, backup architecture, restore testing, and recovery planning are no longer secondary operational details; they are part of the user experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    A note to affected users<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    An apology is warranted here. Losing user activity is frustrating, especially when people expect a product to quietly and reliably preserve what they do inside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The right response is to be clear about the failure, honest about its source, and concrete about the fixes. That is what this post is intended to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A few days ago, some recent user activity on Biblophile was lost due to a hosting failure. The root cause was corruption at the hosting provider level, which affected application data written during the impacted window. Similar public incident responses by companies like Zomato have shown that being direct and transparent is the only acceptable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/biblophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153,"href":"https:\/\/biblophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}