🚨 Production Site Went Down After Accidental Deletion – Real Incident 🚨
This morning, one of our clients reached out in a panic—their live website had suddenly gone down after they deleted what they thought was an old, unused site.
Here’s What Happened:
The client was cleaning up their own hosting account (Hosting A) and deleted a site they believed was just a development version of the end client’s site. One of their team members had confirmed that the production site had already been migrated to the end client’s Hosting B.
But the moment they deleted the site from Hosting A, the live site went down.
⚠️ Red Flag Raised
I immediately asked for:
- Access to the domain registrar
- Access to Hosting B (end client’s hosting account)
To my surprise, the domain was still pointing to the server on Hosting A — which meant the production site was never migrated to Hosting B at all. It was still running from Hosting A the whole time!
Options We Had:
1. Rebuild the site from scratch
2. Ask Hosting A for a backup (but they said it would be chargeable since the site was already deleted)
3. Check our own internal backup systems
✅ Luckily, we had a complete backup in our internal repository.
I quickly restored the website and deployed it properly to Hosting B, updated the DNS records to point to the new location, and brought the production site back online with minimal downtime.
💡 Key Takeaways:
1. Never delete a site without confirming DNS and hosting details
2. Verify actual migration—don’t rely solely on internal communication
3. Maintain external backups—they’re a lifesaver in critical situations like this