We've had a few tech bumps over the past five years but the worst was the time our website was accidentally erased by our hosting provider. It just so happened we were expecting press coverage in a major daily newspaper so we upgraded our web account in anticipation of lots of traffic.
The day the story ran, we scrambled to our website, only to discover nothing was there. When we contacted our provider, we were informed that instead of upgrading our account, it was cancelled altogether.
We were screaming and freaking out. It took us 18 hours to rebuild our site from scratch and we lost nearly $30,000 in sales at a time when we were struggling to pay off loans. We tried to seek compensation from our hosting provider, but we didn't have the deep pockets for legal representation, so all we got was a few months of free hosting.
Now we store and backup our master files on GoDaddy.com, a web hosting company. We've never had a major disaster we couldn't learn from.
These small businesses were hit by a number of different scams. Here's what they had to say about their experiences.
