Small businesses in IT aiming to use an online data storage service will no longer have their needs met by Hewlett-Packard (HP), it was announced this week.

The computing giant decided to stop providing its Upline service after under a year of providing the offsite backup solution, not providing a clear-cut reason as to why it pulled the facility.

Patricia McKinley, speaking on behalf of HP's Personal Systems Group, said: "HP continually evaluates product lines and has decided to discontinue the HP Upline service on March 31st, 2009 ... in order for customers to download any files that have been backed up to Upline."

The service had provided a number of bugbears for users since its launch, with its first month seeing an entire week where the service went down.

According to Mark Hendrickson of Tech Crunch, Upline ought to have been renamed HP Downtime after its high-profile web interface crash soon after its launch, noting that it was one of the worst starts it could make, given it "absolutely needs reliability to survive".

New research from Connect found that, on average, it takes businesses that use backup tapes take 11.6 hours to retrieve and restore files. Connect is now recommending that SMEs switch to online backup.