Good forward thinking; nothing is as sobering as having to do bare metal restores for a DR test and finding out all the little things that were overlooked that go into a system before the tapes spin. Hopefully those AS/400s aren't as painful.

If he couldn't cost justify the $ for backup hardware/server (or pick a colo that offered it as an optional service), an alternate recovery site probably didn't cross his mind.

Isn't it possible that the company hosting the servers could have promised him that they would be doing backups... and didn't? Or would that be his responsibility?

I had a hosting company promise they'd do regular backups only to find they didn't when their RAID array failed. Thankfully I didn't trust them and had my own backup anyway. Needless to say I am not a customer of that company any more. Funnily enough as I write this I'm in the middle of writing backup scripts for a work server.

So what (politically correct term) do you call someone that runs a

major website with great influence that has no hot failover capabilities and no backups?