I disagree with Tony on his assumption that backups should always be there as standard, it entirely depends on what Jeff was paying for. If you want to pay as little as possible for a VM, then a budget no thrills package may be just what you want, and I certainly wouldn't expect it to include backups since from the providers perspective they're an expensive component of a hosting plan.

As with anything the devil's in the detail. Without knowing what Jeff signed up for it's impossible to judge, but saying that a cheap hosting deal must include backups is like those people who run their business e-mail on a free e-mail service like hotmail, and then complain when it goes wrong! If you pay peanuts you get monkeys, but you make that choice. For work I would never use a cheap budget service since in the long run it's not worth the risk, but for me personally, my time is free, paying someone else for backups costs money, if the server is just for fun then a little downtime doesn't matter. The important thing is I know and have weighed up the risks and made a choice.