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."

FastServers policy

[kflat]

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 :)

Note to self: Back up server

[Aokubidaikon]

I really should do this more often. I don't know what I'd do if this would happen to me.

Re:Happens all the time

[suv4x4]

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.

You know, people expect to get service for free as well, but it doesn't mean this should always meet reality. That separates smart buyers from dumb buyers. Dumb buyers will always exist, never mind the market situation.

If Jatol.com dependent on a single guy, then most likely it didn't have plenty of customers, and most of those were quite cheap customers. They got what they paid for.

I pay 60/mo for a virtual server (yes I know I could get dedicated for 50) in a large datacenter, still get great support, and os/updates management, and if any one single guy ceases to show up at work, they'll just hire a new one.

Re:Similar story

[Bryan Ischo]

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.

Fastservers definitely have not anything wrong..

[x_MeRLiN_x]

Fastservers apparently is unwilling to turn the machines back on, so people could get their content, without authorization from Tooley.

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.

Reminds me of this dishonest company

[deftcoder]

http://www.tweakguides.com/Hosting.html [tweakguides.com]

The company discussed here left a few friends of mine stranded as well.

You get what you pay for.

Re:Happens all the time

[fm6]

Well, it doesn't happen more often than I think, not after my own brief tenure on the help desk of a colo provider. We would rent rack space to a "company" (often one or two people) who would turn around and rent it out to other folks. For all I know, they in turn also rented it out. (This is why spam blacklists are so useless: just knowing an IP address doesn't tell you which colo or hosting provider is actually giving network access to a spammer.) The guy in the middle goes out of business, and the guy at the end is hosed. And if the guy at the end is a shared hosting provider, his customers are hosed.

Once I got a pleading phone call from a guy who had rented rack space from somebody who rented it from us. The guy in the middle had stopped paying his bills and got cut off. Policy was to seize the hardware in the defaulter's racks, even if it wasn't his, and hold it hostage against payment. The caller just wanted his hardware back, and if it'd been up to me he would have gotten it. We couldn't sell it, so it was just going to collect dust until the bill got paid — that is, forever. But nope, wasn't going to happen.

Nor was the company I worked for totally trustworthy. Despite having thousands of racks in multiple locations, and its own network backbone, the company was basically the private property of one guy who had started the whole operation in his garage 10 years before. Now, AFAIK, this guy was 100% honest; he was certainly more than fair (well, most of the time) to his employees. But there was really nothing to prevent him from collecting all the bills up front, not paying his own bills, and skipping the country.

And honest or not, this dude was not a great business executive. Because of poor planning and faulty procedures, we had endless network problems and even one highly avoidable power outage. (Caused by maintenance on the UPS!) Really, I think many of our customers would have ditched us in a moment, if they could have found a provider with any certainty of doing a better job than we were doing.

What consumers need is some kind of a neutral audit service. Does the company have cash flow to stay in business? (Perhaps posting a bond to make sure their bills are paid?) Do they have "best practices" procedures in place to prevent stupid accidents like the one we had with the UPS? Hell, do they even have the facilities they claim to have? Then consumers could look at the audit and know what they're getting into.

I was a Jatol customer

[knownzero]

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.

It begins and ends with rsync.net

[enselsharon]

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 [rsync.net]

this will:

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt [rsync.net]

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.