I can never understand why people don't host important stuff/stuff they care about themselves. Webhosting and domains are cheap and even someone with little technical knowledge can create a website. There are tons of options to do that.
The real problem is a lack of backup. There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file, so the real problem is that he didn't use that.
So, essentially, a paid version of archive.org, which would be a _great_ startup idea - something that I've been mulling over for quite some time.
The technical (and infrastructural/logistical) challenges in implementing/executing something like this, however, would be rather steep, imo. In most cases, a simple crawl just won't cut it, as most sites today would have been built using some sort of CMS, with a database backend, so a simple crawl and archive of the public-facing site would leave you with a (horribly) broken version of the site.
As a freelancer, I routinely come across inquiries/gigs where people changed hosts, took a backup of the webroot (and not the database), discontinued the old host and ended up with a DOA site!!
Coming back to the matter of an archiving/backup service, this could be doable notwithstanding the challenges I mentioned above. Something I would _love_ to have a go at, but beyond the means of an ordinary web tech wahm from India. (Any takers? :-))
While people like us (you, me, and all others here) take such things in our stride, the scenario is vastly different so far as average end-users at large are concerned.
And even if it seems to be working fine at the moment, there are no practical guarantees that this will not be subject to change: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DiG9qANf5PA. Even someone as high profile as Linus Torvalds had to resort to the classic method of public shaming in order to get a prompt response.
Lastly, there is not much incentive even if I cared about privacy - my typical recipient is anyway a Gmail account, so Google can definitely construct a shadow profile for the sender even if the sender does not use Gmail.
Again, it is a classic problem of a heavily centralized internet.