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

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 :)

News?

How is this news? A random company with no continuity plan fails and its customers with no continuity plan are impacted? Who cares? Anyone hosting there probably had nothing worth saving or, if they did, had continuity plans. Businesses fail, life goes on. Who cares?

Similar story

Some company you probably never heard of went out of business affecting no one you know. It was really uneventful.

Re:Similar story

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.

Re:Similar story

That excuses the fluff (somewhat, but I've never really minded the "random geek does something irrelevant but neat" type of fluff), but it most assuredly does not excuse the rampant FUD and trolling.

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 /. run this, even if it only serves to convince the DC to open those servers to let poeple get their stuff and move on.

There is something to it folks.. I'm in this industry and this happens far too often.

Re:Similar story

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 :)

What do you mean you can't do anything about it?

If you don't want any stories from kdawson just go to:

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 :).

OT: Grist for the Discussion Mill

On the other hand, like I said before, I think that kdawson may just be fulfilling a specific mandate from the "management" at Slashdot, which is to ensure that articles keep being posted when none others are showing up. In which case, even if kdawson was canned they would just find someone else to do the same thing, making the problem more endemic in Slashdot as a whole and less with a particular editor.

I agree, and I'm not honestly sure that it's such a bad thing. Yes, it raises the S/N ratio. But it's not like bad stories automatically equal bad discussions. And really, who reads Slashdot for the articles, anyway? Most days you can read 90% of what's on Slashdot's front page by reading the "Geek" section of Fark, or Digg, or any number of other sites. (Yes, Slashdot does get the occasional scoop. But that's not what keeps me reading daily, and I doubt it's what attracts most other readers, either.)

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.

Happens all the time

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.

If competitive area means scam

Now I never get hosting without finding out who their bandwidth provider is. The whole buisness of selling and reselling bandwidth reminds me of a cross between multi-level marketing and Enron. Right now I'm using a VPS that is way more host than I need just so I know I'm free from that game.

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 .edu hosting on a HP-UX box.

Re:Happens all the time

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.

Don't worry. Your data is safe.

Just walk over with a USB key. It's a data center so they're open 24/7.

Same thing happened to me

Same thing hapened to me. My hosting company stopped paying the bills. The planet was where he had his servers and they refused to allow anyone access without the old host's permission.

End result I found a new hosting company and have been doing well with them.

It just pisses me off all the user submitted content I hadn't backed up yet.

You get what you pay for

Albeit my Earthlink hosting has had a few coughs recently on their web mail otherwise it's been a big dumb light switch for years and years. $50/month seems worth it, $1.65/day to not have to worry about it.

I feel their pain

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.

Note to self: Back up server

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

"people get their content"?

anyone who doesn't have local backups deserves this. just like darwin awards for websites.

That reminds me...

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!

Fastservers definitely have not anything wrong..

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

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.

No backup, no sympathy

Welcome to the real world.

Hellohost.com did the same thing to me

I've been through it, and I had a bunch of clients hosted on a reseller account. Thankfully I had backups, but it still inconvenienced my clients for a few days while DNS changes took effect and I had to spend those 2 sleepless days uploading and configuring things from backup. It was pure hell, and I prefer to call them HELLohost.com. In a way, I'm happy they went out of business, the owner was a jerk.

Read about it here:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=492952 [webhostingtalk.com]

Missing the point?

"boo hoo, y'all shoulda had a nightly(/hourly/minutely) backup server running off of an OC-3 in your basement" - all of slashdot so far

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.

I was a Jatol customer

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.

Ask Slashdot: How do I avoid this?

I spend a lot of my time bouncing data between laptops and low-quality web servers. Every day of my life is filled with anxiety attacks and extended periods of denial. I burn through laptops like a hooker and underpants. Long story short: my data is in peril.

What is the single best product I can buy and configure at my home office to hold a "safety copy" of my data? Should I simply RAID a few drives in an old *NIX box? Is there a pre-configured-in-a-shiny-box product worth the price? Educate me, please educate me. I still hear the clicking of a crashed MacBook HD, even as I type this.

Self host

Just host it yourself. You'll have almost full control of the information chain, which has its advantages and disadvantages, but it's a lot more fun! Unfortunately, to be truly safe you'd need at least two physical locations which many of us don't have.

Wonder what the service agreement was like. He'd better have skipped the country because he's going to have a class action lawsuit very soon.

Maybe Storm Worm attack?

There is speculation that Jatol may have stopped paying their host, Fastservers.

Could it be a simple case that one of the sites they hosted on their 2 IP address was an anti-419 scammer page that got attacked. This could be a case where a target of a DOS attack took the host down. This outage is in the time frame that the anti-scam sites got nailed by a massive DOS attack. Does anybody know of any anti-scam stites on this host?

Just like Cyberwings

This is a situation like Cyberwings. In that case the owner ended up doing time in prison.

http://www.dotjournal.com/web-hosting-down-cyberwings-story [dotjournal.com]

Fastservers, FWIW

For what it's worth, FastServers is an excellent host itself. I've kept a pair of dedicated servers with them for several years with virtually no problems. I've had one hard drive failure (it was replaced within an hour), and a total down-time of around 2 hours in the past 12 months due to system upgrades or replacements on their end. The odd time I've needed the server cold-booted (damn windows box), it's been done within a matter of minutes at no cost. In short, I can't say enough about them - they're great, and the actions of one of their clients should not reflect on FastServers in any way.

Summary not telling the entire story...

The summary implies that all of Jatol's hosted sites disappeared instantly. This isn't the case. Jatol may have stopped responding to queries on Aug 31, but at least some of their sites were still operational on Sep 5. See thread here [fmwriters.com] from one site who had forewarning that they would need to move.

Bah!

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.

)

Non-Redundant Sysadmin

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."

Sounds like someone needs to find a hosting provider that has more than a single person running the whole company...

My site still works fine

I host through jatol and though I can't reach their homepage, I can get to my site on the web as well as through ftp. I can also access my webstats and online tools for the site. Sheesh, don't scare me like that slashdot! I do appreciate the heads up though. I backed up my site just in case. Crazy stuff. I hope the guy is okay.

This happens often

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.

Dead?

If people are really concerned that he's dead, figure out what town he lives in, call up his local police, tell them the story, and explain that you'd like them to do a "health and welfare check". They'll find him and see if he's alive and/or needs medical attention, or if he's dead. They might even tell you the result.

Agent Resignation

The Kentucky State Secretary has recorded the resignation of their legal agent, J. H. Calvert, in the state.
http://apps.sos.ky.gov/business/obdb/showentity.aspx?id=0559142&ct=09&cs=99999 [ky.gov]

This was received this morning (9/11/07) and recorded. Looks like their annual filing in June showed some office changes and the VP is gone. The owners live in TN and use their agent to file paperwork, receive lawsuits, etc. What does this mean for Jatol's legal status, long arm, etc?

Re:Warnings

anyone need a host or web designer?

Re:Warnings

Shouldn't you keep backups?

Re:Bogus story

Really? Go to jatol.com. The latest word is that one server, Bridget, is still up and running.

Re:Bogus story

I bet its not up now...since he posted this on slashdot he soon made his story true...jatol is down, the first thing a slashdotter is gonna do is go to www.jatol.com.

Re:Is this really news?

Well, jatol was my web host. Thankfully all I had hosted on it was just a game fan site and nothing really that important. I'm out a couple webpages I worked on and like $35.......luckily that is all. This could have been a lot worse and I feel sorry for people who actually had "companies" or "businesses" that ran off of jatol's hosting. I never had a problem with Jatol until now all of a sudden they disappear....it is very strange indeed. Anyways, I'm glad slashdot posted this article because that's how I got confirmation that something was actually going on and that something was amiss. Thank you.

Re:I feel for the principals of that hosting compa

Incidentally, I've run into a similar problem with dedicated server brokers -- where they run into some business issue and the DC that provides the boxen sends a letter direct to the customer base saying, you can keep your server if you send the money to us instead.
At least that way the customer gets the option of keeping the box. Sometimes however the datacenter refuses to deal with anyone other than the person who rented the server/space from them and some have even been known to hold colocated hardware that was colocated through an agent hostage.

Afaict the major data centers are usually provider neutral and just rent out racks and connections from your racks to other peoples racks so if you want to host a small number of boxes there you pretty much have to go via a middleman who rents a rack and deals with bandwidth provider(s). Unfortunately sometimes theese middlemen are fairly small and hence vulnerable buisnesses.