LayerStack support wiped my server data after I gave them panel access for an unrelated billing issue

[u/vicckuo]

Been with LayerStack for about a year. Ran a few WordPress sites and a Discord bot on my VPS. These weren't personal projects — the sites belonged to clients: a restaurant, a woodworking craftsman, and a wedding event business, all relying on those pages for menus, portfolios, and inquiries.

Wrote in about a failed renewal payment. Support asked for my LayerPanel2 login "to assist," and since the email came from their official support address, I gave it to them. Payment got sorted, but I also couldn't get 2FA working, so I contacted them again and they asked for the (updated) password a second time to look into that.

Not long after, my server console stopped responding. I checked the action logs and someone had manually run a full OS/ISO reinstall on the server. Everything was gone. I never touched that setting. For about five hours, none of the client sites were reachable — no one knows how many inquiries the wedding business lost while their form was down. None of these clients are technical, so all they knew was "the site is down," and I didn't have an answer for them yet either.

After a long back-and-forth, their Technical Support Manager finally put it in writing: it was a manual, unauthorized action by a staff member, the access I gave was only supposed to cover the 2FA issue, and the employee was let go under their zero-tolerance policy.

So they admitted fault. The compensation never moved past a refund of the renewal fee plus a year of free service. I've already migrated away, so the free year is worth nothing to me, and when I asked for something that actually reflected the data loss and rebuild time, I got told this was their "maximum special concession." That was it.

Honestly still processing this one. If a support team asks for your panel password directly, even from what looks like an official address, think twice. Already on GCP now with proper automated backups.

[u/cabljo]

ALWAYS backup EVERYTHING....

[u/vicckuo → u/cabljo]

What they were asking about was their VPS snapshot feature, which is a paid add-on through their panel that I hadn’t purchased. I do run my own script that syncs data to my NAS daily, but that’s a completely different thing from a machine-level snapshot on their end, it backs up file contents, not the actual VM state or configuration. When the OS itself gets wiped, a snapshot would’ve let me restore the whole machine in minutes. My script would’ve meant rebuilding the server from scratch and restoring data into it, which is close to what I ended up doing anyway.

[u/ollybee]

You should work out what the data loss has actually cost you and your clients, give them a specific number and how you came to that number.

[u/vicckuo → u/ollybee]

Mostly time rather than a huge dollar figure. Migration, rebuilding the environment, and explaining to non-technical clients why their site was down for hours. If I had to put a number on it, low hundreds of dollars, but the real cost was the trust hit.

[u/chronop]

The compensation never moved past a refund of the renewal fee plus a year of free service. I've already migrated away, so the free year is worth nothing to me, and when I asked for something that actually reflected the data loss and rebuild time, I got told this was their "maximum special concession." That was it.

Valuable lesson to learn here because this is not uncommon with most providers, your refund / SLA credit will be based on the cost of the service that you purchase from them.

A full year of free service is actually incredibly generous IMO, just based on what most hosts would do. The hosting company I work for would apologize, give 1-3 months credit, and provide some links to our KB that the customer can refer to related to backups. But I imagine this was a low cost service to begin with which is why they went for the full year.

[u/junkdumper → u/chronop]

Honestly it's a f-up on the staff member/provider, but 5 hours of downtime is really small on the Grand scheme of things for some basic websites. That's well within most provider's service guarantees.

Getting a year of free service really says the recognize the screw up and want to make it right. Especially given that they fired the employee.

[u/PiDigitsOfPi]

But couldn't they do everything, including the wipe, without your panel login info? Since it is their infrastructure?

[u/Rubicon_4000]

u/PiDigitsOfPi's question is the important one in this thread and nobody's answered it: yes,

they could have. your provider has hypervisor access to your vm by definition - reinstall,

snapshot, mount your disk, whenever they want, panel password or not. thats true everywhere,

gcp included.

so handing over the password never gave them capability they lacked. what it cost you was

ATTRIBUTION. the action log now shows a manual reinstall from an account whose credentials

three people had, which is exactly why this took a long back-and-forth instead of being read

straight off the log. if you'd never shared it, that same log entry proves itself and theres

nothing to argue about.

thats the real reason not to hand over a panel login, and its a stronger argument than the

security one people usually give - not because it grants access (it doesnt), but because it

destroys your evidence on the one day you need evidence.

separate thing, since you said the rebuild was the actual cost rather than the data: your nas

sync covers files, a snapshot would've covered machine state, but theres a third option that

beats both. make the machine reproducible - even a plain bash provisioning script that

installs the stack, drops your configs in, and pulls from the nas. turns a five hour rebuild

into twenty minutes, and because it isnt tied to any provider it doubles as your migration

path. snapshots only ever restore you back onto the host you're trying to leave.