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 feel their pain

[mcrbids]

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.

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 /." instead of "rm -rf ./" or......

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.

That reminds me...

[jmagar.com]

Time to backup my server.

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!

Re:Similar story

[exley]

There is nothing that anyone can do about kdawson and his lame non-story posts.

Sure we can... We can go to preferences->homepage and then under "Authors" uncheck kdawson :)

Don't touch resold hosting

[tehSpork]

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.

Bah!

[jalefkowit]

This is nothing. If you want to read a story of true Epic Failure in Web Hosting, you should go read up on LeafyHost [arstechnica.com] -- 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 [christopherhawkins.com] and here [zechariahs.org]. But really, do yourself a favor and read the thread.

)

Re:FastServers policy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The specificity means nothing. The hosting company is obligated not to reveal details of the account owner's situation to strangers, and in this case the end users are strangers.

I was in webhosting tech support for a short time and went through a very similar situation: A large reseller wasn't paying his bills. He declined the host's attempts to reconcile the issue. His servers were disenplugged.

OF COURSE the guy left his customer-victims in the lurch, and OF COURSE they ran whois on their IPs and called support, cursing or weeping because they had not taken responsibility for their own data. (I especially loved the ones that lost "years of work" on servers that had been up for less than six months.) Here's the thing: Those cursing, weeping, gullible people were not our customers. We had no way to be sure that they really did own the data they were asking for. Our only established relationship was with the exploiter, who could have made arrangements to retrieve his users' data if only he could get their money back out of his nose. In a vhost reseller environment, the end users have no business relationship with the owner of the physical server.

The end users asked a lot of very specific questions and called our "customer" a lot of interesting names, and all we could do was explain, repeatedly, that we could not grant them access to servers they didn't own, and we could not comment on the situation. I think it's entirely possible that FastServers' allusion to the "owner's consent" could have been meant literally, or it could have meant that the account owner needed to demonstrate his continuing "consent" by paying his goddamn bill.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Mod +2 for 'paper statements only'

[Poromenos1]

Gutsy will have a virtual pdf printer installed by default.

This happens often

[Badmovies]

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 [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.