Well, HDD failures might occur to anyone. Its like no one's fault actually (rather than the DC's)
So, shit happens, but even the host's point is right, that you must take regular backups of atleast your DB

Make a CRON job for it

I lost my auto-backup script which used to automate DB + /public_html files for download as backup each day/week It was a l337 script though lol

I wonder if any of the old school dudes have it here *cough* Whoo

Sorry for going offtopic