I’m very sad to hear that a very big Italian ASP.NET portal went down, together with other “normal” e-commerce sites, because its hosting provider, a small hosting company managed by the Italian IIS MVP, closed without warning.

Nobody knows what really happened: not paying the bills, the systems went down while the owner was on vacation and the advertised IT staff never existed. And of course the owner is not reachable by phone, email, fax, whatever

It happened to me a few years ago, when the server that was hosting my sites broke the disk, and the owner of the company, a friend of mine, never did a backup. And from that day I decided I’ll never go with a small, one-person handled hosting company.

A small company can ask you less money, but a big one is for sure more reliable, or, at least, will not close abruptely.

I’m glad my Italian blog is not hosted on the community that went down, but on a community that handles its own servers… but just to be sure, I think I’ll export all the contents to BlogML just in case.

UPDATE: The Registry of Suisse says that the company doesn't exist anymore, at least as legal body, since Sept 2006. How it was possible for it to go on and charge fees and get money for a hosting service for almost 2 years is now the real question.