Hostgator lost my 8+yr website

In February, I logged on, did a little updating of posts, and logged out. I went to log in again at the end of March, and it said there were issues logging in, so I hopped on the chat. They did a little resetting, told me to login again in 24 hours.

I did later that week, and it said my site wasn’t active due to a DNS issue. I hopped on a call, they told me to try again in 72 hours, it would be fixed.

I tried a week+ later, says there was still a DNS issue, got on a call, again they said 72 hours.

This back and forth continued into June, every few weeks being told they were working on the one issue I had on my site. The whole time, my site was down, totally blank if I tried visiting from a browser I wasn’t logged in at.

Then, by the first week July, I logged in and no DNS issue! But when I got to the WP dashboard…all 8 years of posts, videos, interviews, etc. from my site were gone. It was a totally empty WP dashboard.

I’ve sat on calls with support for hours, asked them to get me to a supervisor, all to no avail. They just put me on endless holds and say they’re not sure what happened, or that ‘from our end, you never set your website up.’ Even though I’ve been a customer for 8+ years and it was working before February.

I’m beyond angry, beyond heartbroken, and beyond a simple email exchange. If anyone is considering using Hostgator, PLEASE DO NOT USE THEM. I can’t believe I’ve lost all of the work me and my team had put in for so many years. The only thing I have to show for it are the few pages that were saved on the Internet Archive a few times in that span, and nothing else.

Hope this hasn’t happened to anyone else this year, and I’ll follow up if I get any kind of resolution.