Yep, I'm afraid so, but sometimes your host announces that they are shutting down and gives you a couple of days to get all your data. But it's good to keep a backup just in case they don't.
If you bought your hosting from a reseller then you can send an email to the actual hosting company and request for a backup. Usually they keep backups for few weeks.
always keep your own up to date backup even if your host promises backup because if they shut down, you're basically screwed if you don't have anything to fall back on. The only thing left to do would be to start all over, or just forget about everything.
Don't count on it. The host has no contract with you and no obligation to you. If they have removed the reseller from their systems the chances are all your information will have gone too. Providing data to a 3rd party (which is what you are to them) may not be in their best interests. Some hosts may help out, but many won't. You really need to keep a copy of your web site, and make regular backups of your database to be play safe.
It is always a good idea to keep backups of your sites local. You should also host with a company that has been around for a few years and one which always responds quickly and efficiently to your support requests. One of the first signs that a hosting company is having problems is the poor response times to support requests or no answers at all. When this starts to happen consider changing hosts immediately.
Always keep your own backup and don't rely on your host about their daily backup thing. So in case your host shutdowns you still have your site and can easily move to another host.
Move to the new web host now. If you wait you risk to lose everything as your former web hosting provider haven't informed you about anything.
As others said you would probably be mad at first and then cry especially if you don't have some sort of backup or copy of your files... But seriously, keep a backup of your files at all times especially your databases since you'll more than likely already have a copy of your files on your PC. Get an automated script to download a copy of your database every few days. That way if the worst come to worst you'll be back up and running. Your host doesn't have to close shop and run for you to lose data. The host can have a bad drive and just happens to also find out that their backup is outdated because they didn't monitor if it was running or not. Believe me it happens all the time! If you're scared of your host closing shop on the fly with no advanced notice, than take a look at the professionality of the provider. First impressions is the most important. Do they have a professional website? Do they have a mailing address with phone number? Or does it look like a site a 13 year old put together with nothing but a contact form? If the latter you should probably change providers now.
If your hosting services closes down or goes out of business, you will lose all of your website if the hosting service won't notify you about the closing of their service.
You will have a critical situation at hand if you have not taken any back-up of your site and databases in your PC. Mostly, the host won't do anything to help at the time of closing down. Try to hook up with some other host before it happens.
Thanks guys for all of your opinions and ideas. I guess it just comes down to backing up data. I don't want to cry at the end.
If you don't do backups daily and have all your files, one day you might wake up with nothing left, having to start from scratch I've seen it thousands of times.. get a host that has been around for years, that will be better.. but nothing is for sure