no idea if this would fit best here, or the hosting forum (seems all about advertising there)..

Well, anyone who's tried to access my short tory site over the past day will have been greeted with a lovely 'not found' page.

We're due to move to a new server (and hosting firm) this week, and the old host has suddenly decided to close the acount down with no warning to us at all. So much for 'give you a few days to move stuff' eh?

Question is, do hosting companies have to hold backups of websites? If not, we'll have to spend hours re-entering every single story submitted I've got backups of all the webpages themselves, but the stories were held somewhere else on the server...

It depends. Read through their Terms of Service (TOS). If it doesn't say anything in there about backups, ask them. Usually the hosts backups are for them to do restores and you can't have them, or you'll have to pay to get them.

If they've closed your account, it's possible they deleted everything related to your account, including any backups.

Good luck.

yup.. all deleted

will have to re-add all submissions by hand. Thankfully I have half of them backed up at least....

In future, back up your stories. I do this by dumping them to "webworrks database standard" (WDS) files I invented it, u c. These files can then (with the help of a script) be easily read and inserted into a mysql db.

definitely will be from now on... shouldn't rely on someone else eh

The new version of the site will have all the stories in a mysql database (backed up nightly).. but at the moment it's only the references to the story files in the database

Definitely good advice! From personal experience in founding and working for startup and larger corporate web hosting outfits, the advice never changes: BACK UP YOUR CONTENT!!!

Even in the cases where it was a large corporation with an enormous class A data center and a robotic Legato-based backup system (separate network, expensive software, full-time admin responsible) there were still issues with customers being left in a lurch when their content disappeared and there was still not an actual backup available of what the customer needed.

If it can happen to the big boys, it can and WILL happen to the smaller shops. Consider yourself fortunate you have to only enter things in by hand again...

A quality webhost will perform backups for you automatically or by request.