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I have recently started hosting a website on a famous provider paying for 1 years hosting. One day i had a problem and called cust.-care. What shocked me was, the person while advising me a solution, started telling names of my files, which are invisible to ftp even!!! Though i covered up my surprise, but i am still shocked. While talking i had further asked him to "check if my script within file is correct?", so that i can know whether they feel free to peep into the file also? But he stopped short of doing so saying that they don't have option for that (I don't know what is reality).

Google provides mail service for free, and still does not "see" your mails, and feels sufficiently humbled even for seeing them "mechanically" to select ads for us. Is it common for hosting providers to see our files? or should i look for change? Thanks.

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    Anyone who has root access to servers on which your data resides has access to "all your files" and can see them. There's no avoiding that possibility. If you're that concerned about your data (if its such a huge privacy issue / security issue), you should purchase your own server, place it in your own datacenter that only you have access to, and make sure you know what you're doing.
    – David W
    May 2, 2013 at 19:01
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    Google does see your e-mail. There've been at least two cases of Google employees caught accessing peoples' e-mails without permission. gawker.com/5637234/…
    – ceejayoz
    May 2, 2013 at 19:06
  • You can also look at encryption, but you'll need to be damn good and sure that you don't leave any trace of the private key behind, potentially even in the swap file.
    – mfinni
    May 2, 2013 at 19:14
  • there needs to be an obfuscation process in order to hide easy access to this type of info. My tech support people can manage the hypervisor infrastructure but they can't easily gain access to the customers virtual disks. A person looking at the datastore would see something like a3390f34222dee33... nothing that they have access to would give them the magic decoder ring to know that a3390f34222dee33 is joe blow's vms.
    – tony roth
    May 2, 2013 at 19:30
  • Is it common for hosting providers to see our files? - Yes; it is basically impossible to have anything else. At best you can have some levels of support unable to access them, but the highest levels of tech support will always be able to. The only reasonable exception is if you store encrypted files and keep the password away from the server and away from the host company. Wouldn't be much use for hosting anything except a backup then, though. May 2, 2013 at 19:42

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I have done full support hosting in the past and have at all points been able to access customer data. Of course you do not want your provider to do this without consent on your side. If you do not trust your hosting provider with your data you should look for a change.

If you had asked me to check your script, I would have of course provided that service to you. But unless you had problems with anything, I'd been glad to stay as far from your files as possible, just to avoid working.

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