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Wow, this is an awesome thread - the hosting vultures jump out, the uneducated run their mouth and the OP really has only 1 helpful post...
The reality of managed hosting is that the customer is still responsible for ensuring their 3rd party software (forums, trade scripts, etc.) are secure. Keeping the hosting company's end of the bargain is easy - only a really piss poor host wouldn't be able to keep up with patches.
My experience with clients is that they upload and forget it. As long as it functions they don't care. So when patches come out, they are never applied and their site becomes insecure. Can you honestly blame the hosting company in that scenario? No hosting company can keep up with every 3rd party software release...
I feel bad for Chris, but... he should have had backups in place... I always recommend clients backup their data, especially if it has value (sentimental or monetary), often. I can't see why anyone WOULDN'T back up often. Bandwidth is very cheap and backup services are quite affordable.
Chris, you could always have the drive sent off to a data recovery place. They usually aren't cheap, but we've done this for clients in the past and had a couple success stories (and a couple non success stories... but the good shops don't charge when they don't recover data).
Good luck.
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