Originally Posted by Brad Mitchell

OK.. let's just make sure we keep this conversation REAL. With practically every host backups are optional regardless of whether or not you are managed or unmanaged. "backs of your data at least nightly"...? How much hosting do you do that you back up nightly? By experience most clients that do choose to have backups are more likely to have weekly or monthly incremental full backups with the possibility of key data like databases and configurations backed up daily. Suggesting that it is 4 hours of work is plain silly, you don't know if he had 10 gigs of data or 500 gigs of data to be restored or combed through.

Listen, I'm not saying that this is a good host or a bad host - sometimes bad things happen at good hosts and of course bad things are prone to happen at bad hosts. But, if we're trying to have an intellectual conversation about this situation, let's keep the comments educated and unbiased for at least his sake so he can learn from it.

Depending on the complexity of the compromise, it's also not fair to suggest that completely redoing the box and finding all of the exploit(s) and potential problems is something that is quickly done unless you are simply doing a fresh install and restoring known good data over-top.

That's my

Brad