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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."
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
Some company you probably never heard of went out of business affecting no one you know. It was really uneventful.
anyone need a host or web designer?
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.
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
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.
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
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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.
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?
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.
Shouldn't you keep backups?
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
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
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."
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."
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.
:http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php
Great free PDF printer.I install it to every Windows box I work on.And here is how to do the same in Ubuntu(Or most Debian Based Linux)
http://www.arsgeek.com/?p=1720
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
Gutsy will have a virtual pdf printer installed by default.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
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