Those of you who think that online identity theft is the worst that can happen, here's the bad news: how about thieves that steal not only your data, but the entire web server as well? This is exactly what happened to Peter Gabriel's website yesterday morning when all the browser requests for the webpage ended up showing an apology message explaining the messy situation.

Peter Gabriel's website was redirected to an ISP page that announced lack of service for the above-mentioned domain, along with other affected websites. Well, websites come and go on a daily basis, but this is the first 404 - Not Found message explaining the end-user that the service is unavailable because of a data center raid.

Shortly put, the hosting provider for Peter Gabriel's website got a visit from a couple of less civilized fans who managed to snatch off a bunch of web servers located in the data center. According to the monitoring company Netcraft, the servers hosting Gabriel's website belong to Rednet Ltd, a bankrupt subsidiary of Opal Telecom. Things don't stop here, as Opal Telecom belongs to Carphone Warehouse.

In the meantime, it seems that the hosting provider managed to put the 10 affected websites back online. Gabriel's other beta project, called The Filter, is hosted in another data center and has not been affected by the outage.

Beyond ridicule, yesterday's successful raid on a data center triggered some serious issues. Until now, data centers were touted as being secure facilities placed in safe locations and permanently guarded.

Physical access to the server was out of discussion, given the fact that companies usually upload and download information to and from private areas of their websites and some of the stored pieces of information are worth thousands of dollars if not millions.

We can only wonder: what if the thieves chose not to go away with the servers, but rather rig them with specially crafted malware to direct, say, web traffic or other sensitive information to another location? These are the main aspects to be kept in mind when subscribing for a hosting plan with Carphone Warehouse.