I would like to briefly report on my experiences with a hosting provider from whom I rented a VPS running CyberPanel. I have been running my website ereignishorizont.xyz with CyberPanel for a few years now and am very happy with it. Thanks at this point to the CyberPanel team. I had always assumed that my hosting provider knew a lot more about information technology and data backup than I did, but fortunately I didn’t trust them blindly and backed up my website externally.
At the beginning of the year, on January 4, 2025, I received the news that my hosting provider had been the victim of a cyberattack. My website and the entire VPS were gone. A few days later, it emerged that the attacker had hacked the Proxmox system and deleted all the virtual hard disks, including the KVM-server. At first, they probably wanted to have the data restored by an external company. Then the authorities such as the criminal investigation department, the Federal Office for Information Security, the Federal Network Agency and the state data protection authority intervened, as recovery attempts could cover their tracks.
So the physical hard disks were confiscated by the criminal investigation department and handed over to a special forensics department. They will probably remain there for the next two years, and it is more than questionable whether any data can still be recovered.
When I asked my hosting provider whether they still had the snapshots, I got a negative answer. They had everything on the virtual hard disks. Nothing backed up externally or offline, nothing. That means I got zero data back from a total of three VPSs. Everything gone. It can happen that quickly. Years of work on a website, gone in a matter of seconds. I think there are a lot of people out there who are feeling really sick right now.
I had a stroke of luck. I knew how to migrate CyberPanel and how to back up the data. Of course, the last attack on CyberPanel made me even more aware of data protection and backups. I was prepared, had working backups and a guide that I had written myself.
https://ereignishorizont.xyz/cyberpanel/en/
Anyone who wants to can take a look at my instructions. Maybe it will help one or the other and prevent a total disaster.
