I've a situation, where 1 hosting company had 18 websites, they for some reason have lost 15 of them and told me to re -install the sites! Now the problem is, I paid a programmer to do this costing me £200 per site... as you can see, its going to be expensive! But can you tell me if I have any legal claim against them?
Thats tough, you should've had a backup to begin with. As far as the hosting company goes, I am not sure but I think they do have something like "they are not responsible for any loss.. sorta thing" in their disclaimers/user agreements.
Hosting companies usually only back up system files. Unless you specifically ask that they back up your files then usually they dont. Always keep a back up of files on a regular basis. Its hard with database driven sites becasue the data changes so often but usually if you are using something like Cpanel you can schedule your own backups I think to FTP.
You need to look at your contract and what it has in terms of liability and backups.... normally contracts will have clauses to mitigate their losses to the total cost of 1 years hosting however (in the UK at least) this is fairly mute if they have either breached their contract or you can prove gross negligence... the most obvious possible breach is if they state they make backups and they havent. It is always a good idea to make your own backups of files and more importantly often, the databases.
1) Backups - remember to take tham in the future (or ask your programmer to take them and get them to you if you don't know how to make backups). 2) Ask your hosting to get old backups 3) Ask if your programmer happened to have the code he made - I'm sure he can help you (since he might have those files) 4) Switch host - and get a reliable one (use www.webhostingtalk.com for reviews)
apart from the Backups solution, which to be fair is what you should have done, I recommend you speak to your original webdesigner and hope he has a copy of the sites to re-upload. he shouldnt charge more than £50 to do this IMO
Plaster them all over www.webhostingtalk.com and use the backup that you made (You did do a backup) ... and place on a better host.