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Jatol.com Disappears, Stranding Customers
J Cardella writes "On August 31, Jatol.com — a hosting company that had operated for five years, providing excellent support and reasonable prices — disappeared, leaving hundreds, if not thousands of people without access to their Web content and email. There is speculation that Jatol may have stopped paying their host, Fastservers. The evidence is that Fastservers has been turning off the machines with Jatol's customers' content. Jatol had already collected September hosting fees from their customers (including myself). The story gets stranger. The owner of Jatol.com, Tim Tooley, has also disappeared. He was apparently very ill for some time, and speculation on the thread goes from his skipping the country to lying dead in his home. Fastservers apparently is unwilling to turn the machines back on, so people could get their content, without authorization from Tooley."
I am using it to post this comment as we speak. Editors, please check out your sources.
Shouldn't they warn customers before turning off the servers? So they have time to salvage all their stuff?
If FastServers is telling customers that they can't put the box online without its owner's consent, then he's probably elected to just bring it offline. The SOP for billing disconnection for companies like this is to have customers 'contact their host' for help retrieving their accounts' content. The specificity means that this was probably not a billing issue.
:)
(If any of this guy's customers can post FastServers' reply, maybe they can prove me wrong
How is this news? A random company with no continuity plan fails and its customers with no continuity plan are impacted? Who cares? Anyone hosting there probably had nothing worth saving or, if they did, had continuity plans. Businesses fail, life goes on. Who cares?
Some company you probably never heard of went out of business affecting no one you know. It was really uneventful.
For the last few years, I've been reading forums like webhostingtalk.com and this happens more than you think. The webhosting business has been a real competitive arena for the last few years and people expect to get good service for as little as $1 per month. I'm not surprised when some business get their throat cut.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Just walk over with a USB key. It's a data center so they're open 24/7.
Same thing hapened to me. My hosting company stopped paying the bills. The planet was where he had his servers and they refused to allow anyone access without the old host's permission.
End result I found a new hosting company and have been doing well with them.
It just pisses me off all the user submitted content I hadn't backed up yet.
The Lunatick, Carpe Corpus!
Now I never get hosting without finding out who their bandwidth provider is. The whole buisness of selling and reselling bandwidth reminds me of a cross between multi-level marketing and Enron. Right now I'm using a VPS that is way more host than I need just so I know I'm free from that game.
.edu hosting on a HP-UX box.
Web hosting is so fucked up with people with no physical access to the servers and no idea how a web server even works selling accounts from control panels that it makes me nostalgic for my old free
Albeit my Earthlink hosting has had a few coughs recently on their web mail otherwise it's been a big dumb light switch for years and years. $50/month seems worth it, $1.65/day to not have to worry about it.
I got bit like this once. The hosting provider wholesaler I'd been using vanished. No phone calls, the colo wouldn't help me, and I was stranded with data that was 4 days old, (I had on-site backups, and weekly off-site backups) and some very, very pissed customers.
/." instead of "rm -rf ./" or......
It was about 3 days of hell getting everything together and getting back up. I also had to eat an entire month's hosting revenue due to TOS violations, despite having picked the premiere hosting facility on the west coast. It cost me thousands of dollars. I vowed that this would NEVER happen again - not like that.
It takes just once before you "get" just how bad it can be when your hosting provider goes south, or your server borks, or you accidentally run "rm -rf
So today, I have automated, nightly, off-site backups at all times, and fully redundant hosting "hot" - ready for rollover at a moment's notice, on a different network, different hosting company, in a different city. It would take me about 2 hours to cut over - the only delay is DNS updates. I even test them from time to time, and once had to use it when primary hosting failed.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I really should do this more often. I don't know what I'd do if this would happen to me.
anyone who doesn't have local backups deserves this. just like darwin awards for websites.
Isn't that the name of a wonder weed that fuels cars?
...customers strand Jatol!
Seriously, why does this rate as news? Bad hosting companies fold all the time. And keeping a backup is, and has always been, your responsibility.
I'll leave you with this simple piece of advice: Suck it up, Buttercup!
www.jmagar.com
-
This seems to imply that Fastservers are wrong to do so. I disagree. I'd be very angry if one of my suppliers started using their position as such to talk to my customers and make changes to the services I provide to them. It's not their place to investigate whether Tooley is doing anything untoward or is otherwise indisposed. As long as they offer the same amount of security when malicious people try to tamper with an account without permission, they've done exactly the right thing.
If you don't regularly make a completely separate backup of your website files, you are choosing to risk this type of thing happening. What if your host doesn't make regular backups themselves and your server suffered a hard drive failure? Even if a host claimed they offered this service, nobody would find out until after a failure. Regarding data loss, these two situations are no different.
Moral: If your data is that important to you, don't leave one single organisation in charge of its safety.
I like the drama of this. I really never pay much attention to the fact that where I work our web servers are down the hall. It is interesting to note how the other half lives...
Added Pressly: "Oh, and by the way, milk is nothing but liquid meat."
You have a backup of all your data, right?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I've toured their facility. One does not simply walk into their DC. :(
Can all fish swim?
http://www.tweakguides.com/Hosting.html
The company discussed here left a few friends of mine stranded as well.
You get what you pay for.
Peace sells, but who's buying?
Welcome to the real world.
One does not simply walk into their DC. :(
:)
No? What does one do, ride a bicycle?
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I've been through it, and I had a bunch of clients hosted on a reseller account. Thankfully I had backups, but it still inconvenienced my clients for a few days while DNS changes took effect and I had to spend those 2 sleepless days uploading and configuring things from backup. It was pure hell, and I prefer to call them HELLohost.com. In a way, I'm happy they went out of business, the owner was a jerk.
Read about it here:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=492952
If you don't want any stories from kdawson just go to:
;) ).
:).
http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=edithome
And uncheck kdawson.
I did this for Jon Katz. I think more than a few slashdotters did the same thing too.
As long as kdawson's signal to noise ratio remains tolerable to me I won't be doing that to kdawson.
After all, I think kdawson's story which showed that Miguel de Icaza thought "OOXML is a superb standard" was desirable - lot of people think Miguel is doing the right thing for OSS (heh including Microsoft in a way I suppose
If you think that kdawson's stories are mostly fluff you can just uncheck that box, if enough people do that, he might go the way of Jon Katz - after all they're not going to pay him to post stories that nobody will see
"boo hoo, y'all shoulda had a nightly(/hourly/minutely) backup server running off of an OC-3 in your basement" - all of slashdot so far
So wait...has nobody yet noticed the part in TFS where the guys took the money and ran? Yes, people should have local backups of all their files, databases and UGC, but that doesn't make it acceptable business practice to keep billing customers with no intention of paying your upstream, knowing that the company will not last the month but choosing to keep it a secret until after the servers can be unplugged. (Along with "shoulda backed up" UGC goes any email that arrived since each customer's last login, etc.) FWIW, "but other companies have done it" doesn't make it ethical or acceptable either.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
No, you can't walk or bike into the data center. It's more of a hike, and a pretty dangerous one.
By the Great River, there's a road to the pass of Minas Morgul. Follow the path inward until you reach steps... lots of steps. This is the road of Cirith Ungol. This is a secret path... security doesn't use it, because security doesn't know about it.
You might want to bring some off.
Here. Third on the left, getting a lapdance from that hot chick. I believe that's his private jet below.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Thank god SOMEONE got the reference. :P
One does not simply SSH into Mordor!
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I operate a small hosting business and agree with you 100%, don't buy hosting from someone unless they have physical access to the box and know what they are doing.
After hearing so many sob stories of resold hosting dropping off the face of the planet and customers left adrift I made the move from a VPS and colocated my business with a reputable provider downtown. In addition to the peace of mind it provides me and my customers I've also been free of the the service outages and "oops" moments that were frequent with the VPS provider I had been with previously.
For the most part, they were a decent host. Never had a lot of problems, and service requests were always handled very quickly. Very small company, with el cheapo prices. Yes, I had very recent backups, but that apparently didn't occur to most of the customers using Jatol considering the freaking out on the webhostingtalk forums. I don't think Fastservers is liable at all in this and while I understand that the people who were left hanging want them to do something about it, it's not going to happen, nor should they. The *only* reason this may be an interesting story (and it's not) is that the guy just plain disappeared. Even that doesn't really even warrant this level of attention. Now, if his Enzo is found in a bunch of pieces on the side of a highway, then this might get interesting.
quod me nutrit me destruit
I spend a lot of my time bouncing data between laptops and low-quality web servers. Every day of my life is filled with anxiety attacks and extended periods of denial. I burn through laptops like a hooker and underpants. Long story short: my data is in peril.
What is the single best product I can buy and configure at my home office to hold a "safety copy" of my data? Should I simply RAID a few drives in an old *NIX box? Is there a pre-configured-in-a-shiny-box product worth the price? Educate me, please educate me. I still hear the clicking of a crashed MacBook HD, even as I type this.
barack to the future?
Actually I did uncheck Jon Katz back in the day.
I also unchecked kdawson for a little while but then I got worried that I was going to miss something good. It's not that kdawson never posts something interesting. It's just that his signal-to-noise ratio is too low, and definitely the worst of any slashdot editors. That is what is so frustrating; if every story he posted was worthless I could easily just eliminate him from my view of slashdot. But because he sometimes posts good stuff, I have to wade through all of his crap so as not to miss anything good.
No fluff, no hype, just the best product and best service I have ever had, in any sphere.
If this doesn't convince you:
http://www.rsync.net/philosophy.html
this will:
http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
and as I have been a customer of their parent co-location company, JohnCompanies, for _seven_ years now, I feel very good about their longevity and commitment to customers.
I have no idea about this company, but there are still a lot of web hosts around that don't provide SSH or rsync access. Basically they stick you with FTP and a few lame MySQL tools that you can access through a newbie-empowering management interface, and nothing else.
Combine that with the promises many hosting companies make about backups, and it's a setup for data loss. Particularly on sites that have a lot of user-driven content (meaning that the server's copy really is the original) stored in databases, all it takes is for the operator to get lax about sucking down a full copy of the site on a regular basis, and then the hosting company to go under (or have some sort of significant failure). Suddenly the content is just *gone*.
Lots of clueless people are in charge of web sites. Sadly, this isn't going to change in the future, and it's probably going to get a whole lot worse. As companies have scrambled to make it easier for the clueless to use their services, they often cut corners on features that would make data safety easier (like shell/rsync access).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Just host it yourself. You'll have almost full control of the information chain, which has its advantages and disadvantages, but it's a lot more fun! Unfortunately, to be truly safe you'd need at least two physical locations which many of us don't have.
Wonder what the service agreement was like. He'd better have skipped the country because he's going to have a class action lawsuit very soon.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
If you don't have new topics up for discussion fairly frequently, then the discussions stagnate and die, and with it goes your readership. One of the reasons I don't comment as much on K5 as I used to, is that there are just too few articles (although we could argue for a while as to what the root cause of that is; the decline of K5 is fascinating in itself).
I look at kdawson's "grist mill" stories, and click through to the discussion most of the time, because sometimes it's the really boring and/or trite stories that provoke the most interesting (usually offtopic) discussions.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I've had this happen with businesses billing my credit card with online only statements. Business went under, website disappeared and my online only statements disappeared.
This is why I don't sign up for anything that doesn't send me a paper statement.
Second, several of our existing accounts have records slated to be destroyed since they have been open more than 7 years. This is really troublesome considering you could get an IRS audit that requests records that a) have been destroyed by the bank/broker and b) only have a paper statement that was mailed to you.
These two reasons are why I do not sign up for any of those 'online only statements/bills' services as there is no real permanent record.
Logging into and printing out each month's statement from a half dozen web sites is a waste of their customer's time and the business should know that.
A slam award to my bank for sending me a 'If we do not hear from you, we will improve you account by giving you online statements and also stop sending you paper statements as we currently do'.
Paper may seem a hassle but it's worth gold if you have any issues with the business.
While I think that a USB hard drive is better than just keeping your data stored on your workstation's drive and no where else, it's not a great backup device. Hard drives, particularly when placed into el-cheapo external enclosures, can go south fast.
Case in point: earlier this year I bought a decent Seagate drive and put it in a plastic and aluminum FireWire/USB case from CompUSA. Worked fine, ran well. Then I went away on vacation for a week and didn't switch the thing off before I left (I hit my backup script just as I was walking out the door, figuring I'd let it run and not wait). I came back and the drive was making an awful screeching sound. I touched the drive case and nearly burned myself -- you could have fried an egg on it. The case hadn't let the platters spin down, and it didn't radiate enough heat (it was mounted vertically, free-standing, not touching anything else that produced heat). It had literally baked the drive. So much for that backup.
Those cheap drive boxes are OK for sneakernetting large quantities of data around, but I wouldn't use them for a backup unless you're absolutely religious about switching it off after the backup is done, or you have one of those rare (and expensive) drive enclosures that actually spins the drive down, and has a vent fan to keep it cool. They're better than nothing, but they can be very scary in their own way. As a backup solution for most people, I think they're too unreliable and easy to damage.
Overall, optical discs (provided you buy good ones) are a good solution for most important files. Backing up music collections onto them can be pretty obnoxious, but most things that are really irreplaceable fit easily. If the discs are stored in binders, you can fit quite a large amount of data into a small space. Also, you can mail the discs cheaply, which makes for a low-tech way of performing off-site backups: work out a deal with a friend or family member, and swap CD binders with them. Periodically mail them your latest backup disc, and they send you theirs, and each of you file it in the other guy's binder. (Encrypting it first, if you don't trust them completely.) Instant off-site backup, no bandwidth required; discs are good for probably a few decades at least.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...It would take me about 2 hours to cut over - the only delay is DNS updates. I even test them from time to time, and once had to use it when primary hosting failed. Just as a caution - I don't know who your customers are, but try cutting over the DNS and seeing how long it takes an AOL account to find you. I think their DNS caches are like 24 hours or so. Same thing with a few providers, from what I've heard. This is all unreliable second hand info, though. Just thought I'd say something since it's something that I'd overlook until the 'oops' moment; I always remember something important just then.If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
There is speculation that Jatol may have stopped paying their host, Fastservers.
Could it be a simple case that one of the sites they hosted on their 2 IP address was an anti-419 scammer page that got attacked. This could be a case where a target of a DOS attack took the host down. This outage is in the time frame that the anti-scam sites got nailed by a massive DOS attack. Does anybody know of any anti-scam stites on this host?
The truth shall set you free!
Except with Katz, they countered this by having other editors post his crap. If memory serves there was some rationalization about him being on the road and couldn't submit himself or some such thing but it certainly seemed like an end around the author check box.
Vote Quimby.
This is a situation like Cyberwings. In that case the owner ended up doing time in prison.
http://www.dotjournal.com/web-hosting-down-cyberwings-story
What is the single best product I can buy and configure at my home office to hold a "safety copy" of my data? Should I simply RAID a few drives in an old *NIX box? Is there a pre-configured-in-a-shiny-box product worth the price? Educate me, please educate me. I still hear the clicking of a crashed MacBook HD, even as I type this.
Disclaimer, I have a couple on my shelf, but no other affilliation. The box does nice raid with a couple external USB drives. Simple and works well. Uses much less power than a typical PC fileserver.
http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/simpleshare/
Load an older version of the firmware to Raid the external drives. Raid and encryption has been removed in the new versions of firmware.
The truth shall set you free!
Here is the info.
http://www.simpletech.com/support/guides/user-guides/61600-00072-001.pdf
It's under disk pool management. Support for mirrored and striped is listed.
It is low power, inexpensive, takes little shelf space and works well for me.
Use whatever size external drives you like.
The truth shall set you free!
For what it's worth, FastServers is an excellent host itself. I've kept a pair of dedicated servers with them for several years with virtually no problems. I've had one hard drive failure (it was replaced within an hour), and a total down-time of around 2 hours in the past 12 months due to system upgrades or replacements on their end. The odd time I've needed the server cold-booted (damn windows box), it's been done within a matter of minutes at no cost. In short, I can't say enough about them - they're great, and the actions of one of their clients should not reflect on FastServers in any way.
Dammit, I meant to post that anonymously!
The summary implies that all of Jatol's hosted sites disappeared instantly. This isn't the case. Jatol may have stopped responding to queries on Aug 31, but at least some of their sites were still operational on Sep 5. See thread here from one site who had forewarning that they would need to move.
That's OK... I don't need to bring anything, I can always get off.
I have returned to /. after Digging for a while. You do get consistently more 'interesting' stories than at the more social news sites. Thats what editors are for. I suspect /. didn't have quite as many iPhone stories as Digg and there is certainly less general crap. I also sometimes just read the summary and head streight to the comments. I think because of AC staus you do get more peole commenting here and generally they seeem to know more about what they are discussing.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
This is not news. It happens all the time. Either the owner runs out of money, gets tired of running the "business", or simply decides to fleece his customers.
See the Eryxma/Glexicon saga at wehostingtalk.com.
I worked in an ISP that went down, hard. You put your heart and soul into something, pulling all-nighters and being on call for years. And at the end of the whole adventure all that remains is a few people talking shit about you on webhostingtalk.com
In the case I'm talking about it all happened in a short period of time. The "investors" (thugs in suits, if you ask me) wanted some leverage on the founders so they cut off their credit line (which they had encouraged them to use and rely on, of course). The founders stood up to them and everything got turned off. It's a slow death, it takes a few weeks for all of the suppliers to turn things off, but it happens. When the phones stop working, run like hell.
Hosting is a terrible, terrible business. I run a few boxen now, but only to host customers for whom I do design or coding. And I charge a lot. When some guy says, I can get 5GB for $3/mo, I say go for it.
Incidentally, I've run into a similar problem with dedicated server brokers -- where they run into some business issue and the DC that provides the boxen sends a letter direct to the customer base saying, you can keep your server if you send the money to us instead.
My advice to anyone with a website is: use your registrar's control panel for DNS and point to the shared IP for your host's web server. That way if they go down you don't need to change your whois data etc you just go into your control panel and change the IP address.
Also, I suggest doing a backup once a week (this is for an individual website, if I suggested daily backups you wouldn't do it anyway). Never give someone control of the dns settings for your domain, and assume that any ISP will go down at any time.
This is nothing. If you want to read a story of true Epic Failure in Web Hosting, you should go read up on LeafyHost -- the world's only web host to be founded and then completely melted down over the course of a 100-page Ars Technica discussion thread.
There are so many laugh-out-loud moments in that thread I can't recommend it highly enough.
(If the idea of reading a 100 page thread is daunting to you, you can read summaries of the LeafyHost debacle here and here. But really, do yourself a favor and read the thread.
)Read my blog.
An old web host of mine was basically a friend of a friend running a hosting company from his house, but he was honest and good at what he did. Then one day he vanished, and I later found out he had passed away in his home. However, he had done the responsible thing and prepared for such an occurrence, arranging for a friend of his to take over the operation, contact his clients, and give them some time to make other arrangements.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Sounds like someone needs to find a hosting provider that has more than a single person running the whole company...
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Go for a SAS70-II audit done by a reputable company, they are worth it! We never use any datacenter without first knowing all sorts of things about them. If they don't have the backing to get one of those audits done then they don't get our gear! Saves us a world of headaches.
This is really something else. Early last year I had problems with the web-hosting company that ia had been with for a number of years before they were acqwuired by Web Host Plus. Well, after ignoring my pleas on their forums, their refusal to answer my support tickets, their servers went down and I was able to stop further payment before it got out of control. After some time went by, I contacted eNom, through which my domain name was registered through by the original owners of the hosting company I went through and they acted on my behalf to unlock my domain name so I could transfer it to my new webhost.
... meaning Mesopia, Netbunch and whatnot ...
Suffice it to say, that I haven't had any real problems with my new webhost since I switched and now I have full control over my domain name. I would stay away from any hosting services that are owner by the parent company of Web Host Plus
If you don't like his stories, go to your user settings, then select 'home page' from the the navigation bar, scroll down, uncheck kdawson and the save your changes - enjoy :)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I also operate a (very) small hosting business as part of a web design business (though it's a second job and really more of a hobby). My primary market is local charitable groups. My clients get a better service by using me to setup and manage their hosting. I insulate them from having to know anything about hosting, DNS, server configs, setting up email accounts and the like.
... they'd probably just buy new ones and start again.
I resell web hosting for a company based about 20km away. They colocate about 200km away and I've researched the parent company.
If I died then my clients would probably be fine until my estate decided to stop paying the credit card bills - they could just ftp in to their accounts, backup and move to a new server. Thing is they wouldn't know how to do it. I'd hope that the reseller would allow clients to have their stuff if I stopped paying. But I doubt these types of clients would have anyone to turn to that could help transfer their websites
I host through jatol and though I can't reach their homepage, I can get to my site on the web as well as through ftp. I can also access my webstats and online tools for the site. Sheesh, don't scare me like that slashdot! I do appreciate the heads up though. I backed up my site just in case. Crazy stuff. I hope the guy is okay.
What's important in backup is that whatever system you use meets your needs. My needs are I want full automated snapshots of important filesystems taken at regular intervals (code, /etc, and the like), and I need offsite backups for important, but not necessarily often-changing files (credit card/bank statements as PDF, trade confirmations, my journal, papers from college, etc.) I stress "automated", because I would never remember to do backups on my own.
I use a free tool called rsnapshot to make automatic daily incremental snapshot backups of all machines in my house, plus all hosting accounts. The package conserves space by using hardlinks between snapshots for unchanged files. I keep 1 week of daily snapshots, 4 weeks of weekly snapshots, and 9 months of monthly snapshots.
The package uses rsync to be efficient over the network, and authenticates with remote servers using ssh certificate-based login.
It can backup from any host that supports ssh and and rsync, which means any BSD/*NIX, plus Windows if you install the proper tools (cygwin works well for this. Has an ssh daemon...er... sorry... service, etc.)
The backup server is an old Linux box with a 1.something TB RAID5. Every so often, I tar up and gpg up all the snapshots, burn 'em to DVDs, and leave them in the drawer at my office.
This way, I always have onsite backups that are never more than 24 hours old, and somewhat-regular offsite backups in case my house burns down.
The reason that I typed all of this in, is that your backup needs sound similar to my own. Hopefully I was able to help.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
A lot of hosts are fly-by-night and single person jobs that have only been around for a limited period. Those disappear all the time. Something to always remember when shopping for a host is "you get what you pay for." However, every so often, a larger and established host like this one disappears and lots of people are left in the lurch who weren't expecting it.
The heartbreaking thing is that, quite often, the actual servers are are still there and the accounts are even on them, but the company that owns the servers (or the colocation facility) has them turned off, because their customer (the company that has disappeared) has not paid the bill. Now, everyone wants to look at the server owners or colo facility as the bad guys for not turning on the servers so that people can retrieve their data and migrate. The thing to remember is that they had no customer agreement with the end users. Their customer is the missing host. Quite often, the server owners/colo have no good POC's for those end users. Anybody could say, "Hey, I have 'this site' on 'this server.' Could you please give me access to get my data." It's a mess for anybody to sort out and do it right. Quite often, the server owner/colo is already out of pocket for the unpaid bills from the missing host. Now, everybody is asking for their servers to be turned on (and errors fixed, things managed) so they can get their data, thus incurring more costs to that unpaid server owner/colo.
Want to know something amazing? I've seen those companies, that are already seeing a loss because somebody else didn't take care of their business, do just that. They sort through the mess and find a way to get customers into their accounts.
Now, the best solution for someone is to keep backups. I use www.bqbackup.com to make automatic nightly backups. At the very least, keep a local copy on your home computer or an external USB drive. If a website is that important, then part of managing it is to have a working (and tested now and then) backup system.
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
If people are really concerned that he's dead, figure out what town he lives in, call up his local police, tell them the story, and explain that you'd like them to do a "health and welfare check". They'll find him and see if he's alive and/or needs medical attention, or if he's dead. They might even tell you the result.
The State Secretary has recorded the resignation of their agent effective today.
http://apps.sos.ky.gov/business/obdb/showentity.aspx?id=0559142&ct=09&cs=99999
From their June annual report some changes have been made in management, and the owners live in Tennessee. Matt Jackson seems to no longer be with the company. And since they are a KY corp with no agent now, what does that mean for their legal status, long arm, etc?
Moral: If your data is that important to you, don't leave one single organisation in charge of its safety.
Ethic: Be a part of the escalation path that concerns you.
Corollary: Don't pass the buck.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
The Kentucky State Secretary has recorded the resignation of their legal agent, J. H. Calvert, in the state.
http://apps.sos.ky.gov/business/obdb/showentity.aspx?id=0559142&ct=09&cs=99999
This was received this morning (9/11/07) and recorded. Looks like their annual filing in June showed some office changes and the VP is gone. The owners live in TN and use their agent to file paperwork, receive lawsuits, etc. What does this mean for Jatol's legal status, long arm, etc?
Traceroutes seem to indicate that FastServers lease space from web.com, who leases space from Peer1.net, who buys bandwidth from AT&T. That's a house of cards if I ever saw one.
Here is a list of real, "tier 1" hosting providers. They actually own the networks and data centers. My company has 70% of its revenue tied to our web presence, with about 20 servers. We only deal with these vendors (two of them). A fully managed, SLA'd server will run $500-1500 per month from one of these guys depending on configuration. We've had basically zero downtime since 2001, other than thsoe caused by our own coding problems.
This is why I have automated backups from my hosting provider to my home server.
There are over 10,000 hosting companies out there, is this really news? It seems like hundreds of them flop every day. Anyhow, Jatol people, I like www.ubiquityhosting.com, www.hostway.com, and www.gate.com, any of those get my recommendation. Good luck with your sites and don't get discouraged; these things happen to the best of us. ( :
Dear Mr. Tooley,
Please die.
Please die a slow, painful death.
Let us pray:
I pray you get cancer in the worst possible place.
I pray your guilt drives you to suicide.
I pray your children find a gun and accidentally shoot you in the belly.
I pray your wife puts bug spray in your soup.
I pray a bolt of lightning finds it's way to your head.
I pray your moonshine contains significant amounts of methanol.
I pray you get run over by a truck, bus, train, or some other high speed vehicle.
I pray you are sued for fraud.
I pray you lose everything you own, leaving you penniless.
I pray you are thrown in a jail cell full of horny 300 pound gay homicidal inmates with large members.
I the name of a neutral internet, I pray.
Amen.
Incidentally, I've run into a similar problem with dedicated server brokers -- where they run into some business issue and the DC that provides the boxen sends a letter direct to the customer base saying, you can keep your server if you send the money to us instead.
At least that way the customer gets the option of keeping the box. Sometimes however the datacenter refuses to deal with anyone other than the person who rented the server/space from them and some have even been known to hold colocated hardware that was colocated through an agent hostage.
Afaict the major data centers are usually provider neutral and just rent out racks and connections from your racks to other peoples racks so if you want to host a small number of boxes there you pretty much have to go via a middleman who rents a rack and deals with bandwidth provider(s). Unfortunately sometimes theese middlemen are fairly small and hence vulnerable buisnesses.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register