The lesson here is that some sort of disaster recovery plan is a good idea, unless the cost is prohibitive.
Yes, it's important to have a backup plan, but I don't think that was the real issue. Stu had a backup of the database, which is the important thing with a site like this. My impression is that Stu has put so much time and effort into it that he's felt overwhelmed and now with someone else taking a lot of the pressure off him he's going to bring it back.