I recently had a sobering experience: my web host had their servers hacked and all my data was lost: files, databases, email messages. Everything.  In the back of my mind, I always thought that I didn’t have to worry.  It would be my hosting company’s responsibility to backup up everything on a regular basis: apparently it’s not.  They are going to give me and the other users on that server a month free!  If anyone was running a business, this is a pittance and a joke.

Fortunately, I had backed everything up just a few days ago.  All my databases, and most of my posts stream into Google Reader, so I lost very little.  But what if I had everything in the “cloud”.  I cannot describe how devastated I would be.

Apparently, the hacker formatted the main drive and the backup drive.  It blows my mind how a hosting company could ever let this happen, since this is their business.  I will no longer trust my data to anyone else.  If my host can be hacked and lose everything, it shows that you must get into the habit of backing up as often as possible in multiple places.  I’m tempted to move to another hosting service, but you’d think my current host would be smarter as a result of this mishap.  More than a company who hadn’t experienced the same ordeal.