Distribute.IT after anouncing in a blogpost that 4800 of its clients website data was irretrievable has thrown in the towel and been acquired by the Netregistry Group of Australia. In a press release to affected Distribute IT clients, Larry Bloch, CEO of the Netregistry stated:

We want to help affected customers get back online as quickly as possible, but please understand that we have taken over management of this distressed business with very short notice. We appreciate your patience at this difficult time. We have a large support center and as soon as we get up to speed, we will be able to assist you. Our engineers are currently in Melbourne and have already started to work on evaluating the Distribute IT systems. We currently do not have access to the Registry information for all domain EPP requirements, as soon as we obtain this access we will be able to assist further.

Unfortunately, we are aware that many of Distribute.IT customers have lost backups of their websites. Regrettably, it may be impossible for us to retrieve your files, however we will give you tools to get a website online as soon as you receive login details to our system. If your web designer has a backup of the site, FTP access will be provided to upload the content.

The Netregistry Group vows to honour all existing Distribute.IT hosting accounts and payments. In addition, whilst we are assessing billing and payment history we will be giving all Distribute.IT customers a free hosting service so they can upload their site and get their email addresses working as soon as possible. An email notification will be sent out to customers as soon as customer contact details become available. end

The internet that never forgets does actually provide a number of ways to mitigate the long term affects of data loss when your webhost drops the ball! When stackoverflow lost all their data a while back, they detailed the recovery process. Quoting:

Unfortunately, our hosting provider experienced 100% data loss, so I've lost all content for two websites. Yes, yes, I absolutely should have done complete offsite backups. Unfortunately, all my backups were on the server itself. So save the lecture; you're 100% absolutely right, but that doesn't help me at the moment. Let's stay focused on the question here!

He then began the slow, painful process of recovering the website from web crawler caches.... for the most part successfully! Learn how here.