Hello, I have been trying to contact Infinity Free. It has been difficult to find an email address and the one that I sent emails to ([email protected]) does not work.
In order to contact Infinity Free, I created a new Infinity Free account to use its ticketing system but no luck thus far hunting around the user interface.
So I’m taking a stab at writing here. It is an important issue. I have an account epiz_256XXXXX (the full number is included in the email I wrote) which I cannot access. I would like to know how much do I need to pay in order to get a backup of the database because there are important information in the account running a PHP MantisBT.
That email does work, however support requests are ignored.
You can type the full number here. Only Admin can use it to figure things out, it is useless to everyone else.
Why not? Did you lose your password? Is it suspended? Deleted?
I don’t think paying the Admin is going to solve your issue. If the account was suspended temporarily, wait for the suspension to be over. If it was suspended permanently, create a ticket in the client area, and if it was deleted, that means everything was deleted.
You should never leave any important info anywhere online. Things can be deleted fairly quite easily, and data can be lost. Always keep a copy locally, and if it is important, in a fire-proof safe.
Hi Greenreader9, I received an email August 28, 4am+08 that my account has been deleted because it is “inactive” for the preceding month.
I learnt my mistake now that I shouldn’t have used infinityfree, but that’s besides the point. The whole point of seeking admin’s help is that I don’t have a copy of the data. I used the account to store research data and would like to have a copy back hence I’m reaching out to the admin but it seems like here is the only place to reach out to the admin.
There is no option to create a ticket in the client area or I would have already done so.
It can still be retrieved in the event that it has been soft deleted. I find it astounding that infinityfree would market itself as infinityfree and go ahead to urgently wipe out all databases with a minimum amount of warnings (regretted not using FreeHostia or AwardSpace instead). We are talking about 1-user accounts occupying virtually zero egress and ingress bandwidth per month and sitting on barely an MB or more data. It’s not as if I am “abusing free” by soaking up TBs of bandwidth leaving none for the other users that the account and all the data had to be urgently deleted.
This is what would happen if you do not check emails regularly
Well you had agreed to the TOS
### 2. DESCRIPTION OF SERVICE
You understand and agree that the Service is provided "AS-IS" and that InfinityFree assumes no responsibility for the timeliness, deletion, mis-delivery or failure to store any user communications or personalization settings.
Your account was permanently deleted, along will all its files. The space has also already been overwritten.
Urgently? Suspension for inactivity means that have not loged in into your control panel, or into your website for a long time.
It doesn’t matter the size. If it’s so tiny, why don’t you save it locally?
Where do you get that from? You were suspended for not being active, so your account was cleared to make room for others. The automated system does not take size or data importance into effect. If you want things to not be auto-deleted, you will need to pay a premium hosting provider. InfinityFree is free, so you cannot expect them to take backups, and save sites forever.
InfinityFree doesn’t treat users with small accounts on free hosting different from users with large accounts on free hosting. That wouldn’t really be fair. Premium hosting is a different story, but all of the same rules apply to everyone on free hosting, the same limits and inactivity deletions too. Even premium hosting, might I add, has its own limits. Them’s the rules.
When your account is de-activated due to inactivity it takes 30 days to delete it fully, and in those 30 days you could’ve retrieved your data, or maybe even just reactivate it.
That’s because the account was deleted a month ago due to inactivity. And when an account is deleted, all data on the account is deleted as well. So your database is gone, and nobody in the world can access it.
I hope that you learned that if you have important data, you should always have your own backups. Or at least pay attention when you get emails warning you about suspension and possible removal of your account.
Admin, it will be good to revisit this policy. I seeked help from Aug 28, after receiving a single email on Aug 7.
The apathy for nonpaying users who thought infinityfree was better is clear. Have you considered that that one email will not arrive in all cases and could be filtered off for at least one user? Or that at least one user does not have the budget to respond within 21 days?
This is free hosting. Everything cannot fit your needs. Inactivity was caused by you. If you don’t check your email or you either never opened it, how is IF supposed to be responsible, huh? Let’s be equal to all. There are many whose data has been deleted due to inactivity, they haven’t complained, as they know that it was their own fault.
I don’t know where you got Aug 28 from, but this is the end of September.
Did you know that sending emails on the scale that InfinityFree does ost money? If they send more emails and warnings, they will have to pay more money. Since this is a free service, the only place they get money from is ads, and I don’t think they get that much extra money from them.
An email which said that you had to take action or your account would be deleted within a few days.
If you spot the email, but ignored it for three weeks, and in the mean time your account was deleted,
Have you considered that the amount of server space being used by abandoned accounts is massive? And that this server space costs real money, and you’re not the one paying for that server space? And that the overwhelming majority of accounts which were deleted for inactivity were actually abandoned?
Your account was deleted 20 days after it was deactivated. You say this is not enough time. But then how much time is enough time? 25 days? But then what about the people who don’t check their email for a month? So make it 35 days? But then what about the people who don’t check their email for two months? How much time is enough time according to you?
It used to be only three days. This was extended a lot to give people the chance to reactivate their accounts.
We’re a website hosting provider, not a data archival service. It’s not our business to keep copies of websites until the end of time.
This is true. Email does cost money, and at some point email was actually the largest cost factor of hosting the client area. Fortunately, our current email provider is quite affordable.
Coming to think of it, perhaps a reminder message could be added. This used to be impossible in the past because of how short the suspension window was. But with the longer reactivation window, sending a reminder say, a week after the account is shut down, should be feasible.
1 month “inactivity” + 2 months (= 3 months) is way too short if the full extent of user notice is a single email. I had already stated that that one email may not even arrive into the user’s inbox, let alone be noticed in time. Google (for example) sends an email after 365 days. Before the account is deleted 2 months + 1 week after, four more emails will be sent.
I’m not that foolish I would think there weren’t numerous abandoned accounts, but what I’ve been talking about right from the start is the window. A zillion accounts abandoned; yet in the 7 week window that you operating on, the percentage of accounts that are actually abandoned plunges.
My point was never that email costs little money. It is all about user notice. With a misnomer like infinityfree, when does the user learn that the account is removed after 7 weeks? In the file manager? Database page? Account login panel? This is why people are upset when infinityfree removes account, but not when pythonanywhere (for example) does. Because in one case people are told infinityfree while in the other people know they have to “perform reactivation” every x days. No emails needed.
But they are related. If you get more emails, IF pays more money, than the service will no longer be free.
A message would be shown in the client area (As that is the only place a message can be placed), but none is put there, because the second you login, the counter resets.
People that are upset about that are semi-rare. Most people are mad at the suspension system, mainly because they don’t understand it.
Please realize that you haven’t logged into your client area, or visited your website, in over three months. The automated system cleared your account to make room for others since you were apparently not using it. Since you are not paying for the space, you cannot change how the system works. If you get premium hosting (Only $4 /month), you don’t have to worry about deletion, as they won’t delete your account unless you stop paying.