[the_logos]

Unfortunately, you should, as we ourselves learned a few years ago while hosting with a MUD-specific provider. The problem is that your downside when something goes wrong is SO much larger than the hosting company's, as they don't typically incur a lot of penalty for losing your data (and none for the loss of income associated with being down if you're commercial). They're less motivated than you are to prevent 100% of problems. Luckily, we were able to get our harddrives from the ISP and send them out to a data recovery firm (they had crashed, and the host had failed to actually run the backups that were their responsibility) and were only down for 6 days, but it was horrible.

Our feeling now is: Investigate your ISP thoroughly and then trust, but verify. And run external backups along side the internal backups. (We do a triple layer of backups now as I'll be damned if that's ever happening again!) You should have no problem doing at least weekly offsite backups for instance, which will minimize any future problems like this, if not completely get rid of them.

--matt