I'm glad you sorted it out. Missing content is a nightmare!

Be sure to be the one to purchase your domain and hosting next time. It's yours anyway and it's actually a pain for most designers to handle accounts. As far as maintenance go, it should only be to make fixes on demand (when you contact them). As a designer, it's virtually impossible for us to keep an eye on all websites we're working on on a daily or hourly basis.

The "data" is actually a backup that the host generates automatically daily. If you just purchased the hosting yourself, this should never have been a problem.

Not condoning your designer. His lack of response is worrisome, especially if you paid him monthly for the maintenance and not just some one-off fee, which is an offer I'd be skeptical about.

But really, a designer should only be a designer. Domain and hosting are your property, you should be the sole owner of it to get access to payments, settings, support and notifications. If the host goes down, it's also not the designer's job to fix it. The best they can do is just contact customer support because they don't have access to the main server.