Thanks for the questions, I was waiting to do a big announcement once we had important updates. And waiting... And waiting...
There's been a lot of housekeeping needed behind the scenes (dealing with nearly 800 reports leading to the removal of 1,000s of spam posts, defederating some of the worst instances, communities that needed their Moderating teams adjusted, a deleted community that needed recreating, etc) but there hasn't been any progress from Tom.
For the sake of transparency, he messaged me on here with his email and he replied once my email. I basically set out our plans and asked for full access to the hosting and the transferal of the domain to GreatAlbatross (he had offered the latter in his DM on here I don't want to make it sound like a hostile takeover). I also set out some options - it might be, for example, that he has other projects on the server or there's complications with the hosting so he can't give us permanent access, in which case we'd need the code and database so we could transfer the site to our own hosting. That would involve a bit of downtime but I think everyone would be fine with that if it ensures the ongoing viability of the instance.
So that's where we stand: Tom popped up, updated the instance and made myself and GreatAlbatross Admins (which only gives us access to the web interface, which is fairly limited, and a few super-Moderator tools for fixing things).
So the answers to your questions are probably obvious but here goes:
Is there more than one admin able to update the instance?
No, just Tom.
Does someone other than Tom have access to the server in case it goes down or has a problem?
No.
Are backups being taken and if so does more than one person have access to them?
Backups are usually pretty standard with web hosting services but, as only Tom has access to the server, I don't know what frequency they are.
So where do we go from here?
Making GA and I Admins is only really a sticky plaster on the issue of making this instance secure for the future. We really need full access to the server and we need to get the finances sorted so there's enough money trickling in to cover the costs.
It should be easy enough to sort this out but it hasn't been and resolving that on Feddit.uk is out of my power. We have to rely on Tom to sort out the access we need. Without we are stuck in a bit of limbo.
So the solution seems to be: give Tom a deadline and if we can't get access or the ability to move the instance to new hosting then we are committed to starting a new instance.