I want my data!

[hotdog_pk]

Hi, heres my situation.

my site, ratemymates.net was on some servers.

The servers went down and for almost 4 days its still been offline.

The Hosting company changed their MSN name to:

The Planet - 'The primary hard drive on this machine has failed. We are in the process of rebuilding your server'

... however I wasnt online when they changed to this name, and havent spoke to them on MSN since, not unusual.

I email the hosting company several times, asking the hosting company if they could possibly give me my information back, I got:

The old server went down at the worst time possible (*{edited}*) and I am unsure what the problem was - I am just finding out now. I am restoring the whole server.

--over 48 hours ago
But this conflicts with what support's MSN name was- now they dont know whats wrong?

I emailed them again, asking that I could atleast have a specific account back... and was replied with a message basically saying that i would be put on a 'priority list'.

since this I have emailed plenty of times asking for updates, but with no response.

Then I decided to email The Planet (Where the dedicated servers are located) asking:
1) Could I verify that the hosting company is lying / still actually owns servers with them
2) If possible, could I have the specific account back (I provided some information such as userid etc. on the server to verify who I am)

They replied saying that they "cannot give information concerning their customers" - Which is agreable...

HOWEVER... (bottomline)...
dont I have the right to access my own data?
this doesnt concern the planet's customers, it is information concerning their customer's customer.
In the UK I would wave the Data Protection Act in the air and hope to get lucky, but I dont know what the US equivelant of this is...

can somebody just tell me where i stand...?

I am also very happy to say that the hosting company does not mention limited liability once in their Terms of Service, but that isnt my type of thing...

I have bought dedicated servers so that I can host the site I need in question. And because of my experience I am also establishing a (new) hosting company that actually responds to emails, helps customers, and doesnt oversell(which I prosume the hosting company in question has done!)

[JMJ]

Always keep you sites backed up yourself either on your own computer or even a second Hosting account. I actually back up data on my home computer to a server in case it ever crashes which is what happened just a couple of weeks ago.

If you have a server with them then most likely they aren't backing up the data. You are resposible for this unless you are paying extra for this feature.

[hotdog_pk]

The host actually told me that they make backups every week and month, however this was probably another lie because it doesnt look like they are using the backups to restore anything. [I cant get proof - MSN History seems to have cut out when he said it ]

I usually make backups myself,and I have a backup of the physical data and script, however not the SQL databases.
Im still waiting for a reply from either The Planet or the Hosting company about simply giving me my SQL databases back, but I am not optimistic :-@

[JMJ]

If it's a shared account then they should be doing backups but I don't know of any including myself that backup entire servers for one client without a large fee to go along with it. There's not enough profit in $100 servers to back them up. $4-500 a month mabey.