Jatol.com Disappears, Stranding Customers 179
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."
News? (Score:1, Insightful)
Similar story (Score:5, Insightful)
Happens all the time (Score:4, Insightful)
If competitive area means scam (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Happens all the time (Score:2, Insightful)
I have this conversation regularly:
Me: Sorry, the only solution to that is to restore from your latest backup.
Someone: My latest what?
What do you mean you can't do anything about it? (Score:4, Insightful)
http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=edithome [slashdot.org]
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have access to rsync. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Similar story (Score:5, Insightful)
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
There is something to it folks.. I'm in this industry and this happens far too often.
dot beats digg (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:News? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.