What records might a hosting provider hold?¶

A hosting provider may hold records about its customer, the infrastructure supplied and activity used to administer that infrastructure. What exists depends heavily on the service.

The product determines the records¶

A basic cloud provider may record a customer account, payments, virtual resources, assigned IP addresses and administrative access. A managed website platform may also hold content, publishing history, user permissions and backups. A reseller may hold the end-customer details while the underlying host sees only the reseller.

This is why identifying the company name is not enough. The enquiry needs to identify the product and the provider’s position in the service chain.

Potential records include service creation and cancellation, billing, support messages, configuration changes, security events, administrator logins, domains associated with the account and, in some services, stored files or backups.

Logs and cloud resources may be rotated, overwritten or deleted. Use exact hostnames, IP addresses, account identifiers and timestamps, including the time zone, when seeking preservation or disclosure.

Hosting records may connect infrastructure to an account. Shared credentials, contractors or account compromise may still explain who performed a particular action, so corroborate with platform, communication, payment and device evidence.