[cordite]

I have a service on OVH myself.

Though a friend at another related service had been kicked from two VPS providers due to receiving a few DDoS attacks. These providers claimed it was against their Terms of Service and ejected him as a customer. That day he learned it is best to keep offsite-cross-company backups of everything, since he did not get a single byte from his machines.

[yardie]

Who are these providers that just delete client data? I run a small datacenter for our niche of clients and when the contract terminates or the project is finished I box up all their data and fire it off to S3.

Storage is so cheap these days there is no excuse not to keep client data for at least a month.

[yogo]

Claiming it was against the terms might be an easy out for them but is silly since being a target is outside of your control, for the most part. Hosts will usually null route customers without sympathy to protect other customers so it's the price of doing business.

[kalleboo]

It makes a DDoS an even better extortion. "Pay up or we'll get you kicked from your hosting provider."

[alxndr]

"...and potentially lose all of your data, if you haven't been planning ahead"