OK, so I am stretching an analogy a bit far there, but for 4800 Australian website owners, the point is driven home today. Recently DistributeIT, a mid-sized and pretty reputable hosting company was very seriously hacked - to such an extent that there are 4800 website and associated email accounts that are simply 'unrecoverable' to quote the company itself.

What does that mean? What would it mean if it was your business? We have clients who earn thousands and tens of thousands per month in online sales - from one day to the next those people had they been hosting with DistributeIT would have lost that income for an extended period of time. Could your business take that hit?

The fact that the company has said that the sites are 'unrecoverable' is really scary. Where are the backups? Who was responsible? Most hosting companies offer automated backups as part of the deal - so what happened? Were they stored on one of the machines that was hacked?

I guess the point here is that business owners (and even individuals) probably need to start taking some responsibility for their own data security. In recent weeks with hacking into Sony and Sega, we are learning that the big stable 'trustworthy' players may not be that reliable after all. Most hosting packages allow you to take backups of your site and databases and store them locally on your computer or a hard disk.

The same can be said for your regular office data - is that backed up? How and by whom? Are you confident that if you needed to restore it, it would work?

Let's make sure we all learn from the recent lessons and not just trust everyone that has a sweet smile and trustworthy name.