hosting downtime, offline for 2 weeks, ranks massacred

[vampke]

Hello,

After working on it for over 3 years I had (past tense...) a succesful niche site that scored quite well on specific keywords.
I noticed yesterday that the site has been offline since nearly 2 weeks (it's a static informational site that does not need much maintenance).
For reasons that are unclear - even to himself - my hoster decided it would be a good idea to delete the entire site from his servers without making a back-up first...
The site is now back online and I was able to recovered most (but not all) of the high quality content.
Unfortunately the site disappeared entirely from the serps which is to be expected after being offline for nearly 2 weeks.
Does anyone have a similar experience and can tell me what to expect from this? Will this site ever get back in the serps like it did before or is it now a lost cause for years to come?

[not2easy]

Do you use GWT? If so, go in and submit a new sitemap. If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account you probably will also see a Notification at the top of the account, it may help to tell them the issue has been resolved. IIRC all you would need to do is click on the Notification and mark it as corrected.

[TheMadScientist]

Get it back up, leave it alone and go about doing what you do -- I've had sites go down and a site that didn't auto-renew be offline for 30 days before, but within a week or 10 days of noticing and getting them back online they ranked where they were before whatever "error" occurred to take them down.

[edited by: TheMadScientist at 4:28 pm (utc) on Dec 3, 2014]

[vampke]

thank you for your kind reply. I am somewhat less worried, although I'm still unconvinced.
Will keep you updated.
thanks for the tip on wmt.

[lucy24]

leave it alone

You mean, of course, leave it alone after changing hosts. (TMS? What the heck are you doing back?!) ... Unless the present hosts go mad with groveling and offer you free hosting in perpetuity, which might convince you that accidentally deleting a site is not something they do on a regular basis.

[TheMadScientist]

TMS? What the heck are you doing back?!

I saw all the neat lil badges and wanted to know which ones I had - lol ;)

[superclown2]

I've had similar problems when hosting companies have gone belly up, accounts haven't been renewed because I'd dropped heavily spammed email addresses, nameservers have changed and I haven't been informed.

Every single affected site has made a complete recovery within days or weeks of my putting things right.

[RedBar]

Will this site ever get back in the serps like it did before or is it now a lost cause for years to come?

It's only ever happened to me a couple of times in the past 20 years and both times everything was back to normal within 10-14 days max. Actually the last time it happened was in February this year, I moved all sites to a new host within days since it became abundantly clear that the new owners hadn't a clue what they were saying and emailing.

[elguiri]

Slightly off topic. I know hosting companies can't be recommended on this forum, and rightly so. Nonetheless, there is a wealth of information held among members that many would find useful. I propose a spin-off from the forum where members can vote up service providers, with votes weighted by the seniority of the voter. Could be monetized and help Jim pay his hosting bill.

[brotherhood of LAN]

With a WebmasterWorld subscription you gain access to the Webhosting Issues and Options forum, where you can discuss specific hosts and their pros and cons.

[elguiri]

Gotcha, brotherhood of LAN

[Hoople]

There are a few free web monitoring online apps you can point to a server and have it alert you to what changed.

When the server default page appears (in place of your site) or it starts responding with 500 errors you will know. Many check once daily for free. Look around and you'll find hourly ones, some for a low fee will check many sites....HTH