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."

Comments

News?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:News?

[eepok]

Riiight. It's not news if people don't die or doesn't affect you?

The news here is that a known resource has disappeared (without notice), leaving customers without their data (without notice), and the owner is not to be found (not giving notice of leaving). That's strange. Quite abnormal. And loss of data, in the tech world, is pretty detrimental to most endeavors.

Have a heart.

Similar story

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Some company you probably never heard of went out of business affecting no one you know. It was really uneventful.

Re:Similar story

[tinkertim]

That excuses the fluff (somewhat, but I've never really minded the "random geek does something irrelevant but neat" type of fluff), but it most assuredly does not excuse the rampant FUD and trolling.

I agree that there is quite a bit of rampant trolling. This is not a case of rampant trolling. This happens quite a bit, I was actually amazed to see it on /.

There are a _lot_ of people who see the $15 - $20 that they pay a host as a hardship, for them it is. Many people in IT do not have jobs, trying to make money via (some kind of site) is a last ditch effort. Many hosts restrict external MySQL connections, backing up databases every 15 minutes must be done manually, this is problematic if you hope to sleep.

Someone 'just vanishing' like this is a really below-the-belt blow to many people who have sunk quite a bit of time and effort into a project that hoped only to make a couple of bills go away.

I can only say, you insensitive clods, not _everyone_ makes 80k a year for processing oxygen :)

I'm glad to see /. run this, even if it only serves to convince the DC to open those servers to let poeple get their stuff and move on.

There is something to it folks.. I'm in this industry and this happens far too often.

Happens all the time

[cerberusss]

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.

Re:Happens all the time

[JoelKatz]

I see a lot of posts on various forums from people who don't have copies of their own web sites, databases, email contacts lists, and so on. I feel bad for these people, but they really are victims of their own stupidity.

I have this conversation regularly:

Me: Sorry, the only solution to that is to restore from your latest backup.

Someone: My latest what?

If competitive area means scam

[gambolt]

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.

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 .edu hosting on a HP-UX box.

What do you mean you can't do anything about it?

[TheLink]

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 :).

Missing the point?

[BillX]

"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.

Re:Warnings

[zentigger]

Shouldn't you keep backups?

If you have access to rsync.

[Kadin2048]

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).

OT: Grist for the Discussion Mill

[Kadin2048]

On the other hand, like I said before, I think that kdawson may just be fulfilling a specific mandate from the "management" at Slashdot, which is to ensure that articles keep being posted when none others are showing up. In which case, even if kdawson was canned they would just find someone else to do the same thing, making the problem more endemic in Slashdot as a whole and less with a particular editor. I agree, and I'm not honestly sure that it's such a bad thing. Yes, it raises the S/N ratio. But it's not like bad stories automatically equal bad discussions. And really, who reads Slashdot for the articles, anyway? Most days you can read 90% of what's on Slashdot's front page by reading the "Geek" section of Fark, or Digg, or any number of other sites. (Yes, Slashdot does get the occasional scoop. But that's not what keeps me reading daily, and I doubt it's what attracts most other readers, either.)

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.

dot beats digg

[ThirdPrize]

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.