I'm in a terrible mood at the moment as my host seems to have gone offline completely.

I think the whole hosting company was sold recently and that's maybe why it has gone offline but still, that's no excuse as I have been paying the hosting bills.

I have received no email (in fact I wasn't emailed when the company was sold) and I was given no warning what so ever.

I don't mind losing the HTML files, but I had written 55+ posts in my football blog and I may have just lost them all.

The question I was going to ask is if there is anything I can do to get the host to refund my last hosting bill or give me some compensation at least. It's probably my fault for not doing a back up of the files, but I think it's very unfair for the host to just drop offline.

Thanks,
Pádraig

Ok, my host is back up.

But my question still stands: is there anything you can do if hosting companies just drops offline without any warning what so ever?

Terminate contract and transfer to another. Look at your contract, do you lose your money if you cancel their services?

With mine if I give them a few weeks notice I get refunded the month's that I am not using. (I pay every 6 months).

If your host is a poor host transfer away. Honestly, there are plenty of good hosts out there who will be more than welcome to take you aboard.

and yes, sometimes hosts do just *disappear* sometimes.

At the very least I would backup your website, or at least the database.

Setup a cron job or something that will email you your backed up database once a week or something?

They probably guarantee an uptime of 99%, which means you just had the 1% downtime. In that case you cannot terminate the contract (that's how it works in Holland)

Exactly. Another thing to remember is a lot of "Hosting companies" are 14 year old boy's who have a computer in their basement and their mommies turn them off while dusting... So watch who you host with.

But how can you tell? I know it's easier to tell with the bigger hosts but when it comes to the smaller and cheaper ones, how can one tell if the the people behind the company are 14 year olds or not?

You can't really.

Before you make a commitment to a host, do some research on it. Tons of info found here: http://www.webhostingstuff.com/

There's a lot of budget friednly hosts out there. In my experience the larger hosts seem to be the more budget friendly.

1and1 gets a lot of flack, but they're HUGE and have great uptime. VERY cheap hosting.

HostGator, Site5, Dreamhost, etc... are all good too.

yes you can..
Just send an email, see how fast they reply and HOW they reply.

I just moved my domain-name to a Canadian host, and I'm really not impressed by their helpdesk, although they have big companies as Nike and the government of Canada, they suck at support..

Well I like to call them and talk to them. If they aren't willing to take the time to sell you their product then they aren't going to take the time to help you once you've purchased it.

Exactly...

Yeah, there is not much you can do if your host drops you and moves on. I've read countless stories and the host has complete control, and does not even have to give you your data. To prevent this from happening to The Web Squeeze I placed a backup system which backs up the website to an external server at my house. This is super easy to do, and certainly worth it.

I should do that too.. at least with my database

I guess all I can do is take regular back ups. Thanks for the replies!