Originally Posted by GrouchyAdmin

If there's anything that you can take away from this: Yes, his statement was quite brash, and he was being a bit of a jerk. If they offered backup solutions, and you opted out, you opted out of a RAID configuration, and you failed to keep a backup - there's relatively little that can be done without great expense to try to recover any data on the drive.

I've seen fully managed servers throwing errors that home-rolled (ISP made) scripts have failed to notice. I've also seen hosts go out of their way to attempt recovery when the problem is not due to negligence, but due to the customer trying to save a buck. If they spent 3 days trying to recover your data for a $xx.xx account, they've already lost money.

I'm not going to say they weren't rude - but if you didn't opt for a backup plan, or make your own - it's not feasible for every host to make redundant copies; disk space is cheap, but overselling is the norm for entry level accounts.