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Comment by pan69 | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty unbelievable that a hosting company like that doesn't make backups for their customers by default. Even if the guy didn't follow the "instructions" to the letter you can still assume that the hosting company are the experts here. And why are these guys physically deleting files on cancellation of an account? Pretty amateur if you'd ask me.

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Here's why a hosting company doesn't make backups by default: it costs money. You can either be a premium hosting party where the service is all inclusive, or you can offer your services a la carte, where customers can choose what they want and pay for. Both are valid business models, either way, TANSTAFL.

It's up to the customer to choose. Why would a business give shit away for free after the client made their choice not to buy it?

And as far as I can tell they didn't "physically delete files", they just pulled the plug on a VPS as per the clients requests. You think being able to terminate an EC2 instance is amateurish from Amazon?

In their press release[1] they say they do make backups for their customers by default except in cases where the size of the backup exceeds a certain threshold which happened in this case. Supposedly the customer was notified of this in writing and acknowledged.

Discontinuing backups and deleting data on account cancellation seem like reasonable acts to me. It is a sorry case but it sounds like misunderstanding by the customer, though the process seems a touch messy and could be improved.

Hopefully that will be VentraIP's take away from this, though they probably won't acknowledge this if legal action is pending.

[1] http://www.ventraip.com.au/files/pr-tvc-130212.pdf

As I see they are not taking care of their customers. If just have a retention policy of the data after the cancelation, let's say for 3 days, or a week, the problem could have being avoided. Win-win situation.

They're going to sue you now too. ;-)

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