This article on the BBC website reports on how 123-reg – a web hosting company – has accidentally deleted the websites of an undisclosed number of its customers. To make matters worse, it seems that it didn’t have backups of at least some of them.
Some years ago, I was with a company called UKHosts. I ran several websites for myself and other people from their servers. They were not particularly good on the customer service front in the first place, but the final straw came when I found out that they’d been hacked and not told anyone – it was one of my clients who reported that their site was down, and when I checked that’s when I found out they all were. UKHosts didn’t have any backups – or if they did, they were not very quick reinstating their servers from those backups. Oh, and they also reckoned they’d tried to contact people!
I switched hosts immediately, and I’ve been with 1&1 ever since. But the UKHosts hacking affair (there were apparently several more after I left them) appears to have nailed their coffin shut and they were taken over by Media Marmot shortly after.
Times have changed in the ten years or so since then, and many companies run their websites on the servers of these smaller hosting outfits like 123-reg. As one of them is quoted in the BBC article:
This will wreck my business and plenty of others…
It makes you wonder if 123-reg can survive something like this (edit: their parent was bought out by GoDaddy in 2017 – this article dates from 2016). Having something go wrong is one thing, but not being able to recover from it properly is a different matter entirely.
Any decent business should have its own backup – many of them use WordPress as their content management system like this blog, and I have an automatic backup made every night. However, the hosting company really should also have complete backups of all their servers. If not nightly ones, weekly ones at least.