Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
There is nothing that anyone can do about kdawson and his lame non-story posts. I wrote to CmdrTaco personally about this yesterday and the response I received was basically that kdawson is doing a good job, especially given that we're in a slow news period. So basically, this is just how Slashdot is supposed to work and the people who run it see no problem.
I get the feeling that kdawson's mandate from the Slashdot team is to keep the stories coming; he's the guy that has to step in and post useless stories on days when there isn't much news just to keep articles coming so that Slashdot can keep the page clicks up. Must not be a fun job, sifting through hundreds of completely lame articles just to filter it down to the least crappy ones, that we then get to enjoy.
I can't think of any other way to explain the fact that his (kdawson's) stories are mostly fluff.
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.