Question - Can you legally sue a webhost if they fuck up?
 

Hey, i just had a tech from my webhost fuckup my site. Its a big site and causing me to loose around $200 a day at the moment. They fucked up by deleting about a weeks worth of posts off my high traffic forum whilst trying to solve a problem. Its a fully managed server and my profit loss is directly related to them fucking up.

In basic, do i have grounds to sue them for loss of earnings? If you count all the negligence on there part and fuckups they have cost me in the regioin of $3000 at the moment.

You can sue anyone at anytime for anything.

Whether you'll win and/or collect damages is another matter altogether.

im from england so we dont normally sue people here like u sue people there. I just want some compensation.

Did you have a special contract? or just their default terms? Reads to see if they are liable for anything.

Not sure, it really all depends on their TOS and what you paid for when you signed up. Did you pay specifically for a backup service (that is, you paid them money to keep daily backups)? If you paid them specifically for a special service for backing up your stuff daily, and they weren?t doing daily backups, then you possibly could have a case due to them not fulfilling their service. Even then though, you probably could only sue to get back money for the service they failed to provide you. I really don?t have an idea how laws would effect them there though.

Not always. Just because you have "we're not liable for XYZ" in your terms doesn't mean you CAN'T be found liable for it in cases of extreme incompetence, negligence, or both. It's fairly routine for the TOS to be thrown out, especially if it obsolves them of ALL liability in ANY case. It offends judges.

I would tell them the problem and ask for credit for lost money.

The above posters are right.

TOSes are pretty clear (I've worked at two big hosting companies). Usually they say we don't owe you any quality of service, and we aren't responsible for any outages.

Secondly, incompetence doesn't usually qualify you for renumeration, and courts usually have a 'reasonable expectation of service' rule of thumb where they say, "If this person's paying $100/month for service say for dedicated hosting then we can't reasonably expect a customer making $6000 - $9000/month in revenue to use them over a more costly solution"

TOS get set aside on a daily basis in court, in fact, i believe there is a ruling somewhere that I read about a companies TOS and their client, where the companies TOS was basically thrown out because even though they said "we are not liable", they ran a business where they HAD to be held liable

Correct, Jace. I won't bother replying to greg, because although he brought up some interesting points, what you just said sums up the "real world" scenario.

and to add to that also....if you are a company, and aren't having a REAL lawyer draw up your TOS, you are in for a world of trouble to, there is a lot of legal speak and terms that need to be included

I have seen it all over the place where one company will just copy another companies TOS, and that shit will come back to bite them in the ass if and when they get into big money and lots of clients

Aye, it really just depends on the state that you live in. TOS?s aren?t worth the digital paper they are written on in states in California; that is with a good lawyer you could slice right through the TOS, it wouldn?t matter how well it was worded. In other states they are harder to get around. I guess it just depends on where you live. Most TOS's are pretty clear in what they are providing... it's not like I can just throw up a TOS and have in there things that simply aren?t true. Like say you are offering a service, then in the TOS state ?we are not required to provide this service, even though we charge for it.? (those are the kinds of court cases you hear about frequently with TOS?s being so easily shot down).