A short blog for this week as I have to work all weekend to catch up after yesterday's disaster.
So, first things first, a BIG APOLOGY to anyone who has a site hosted by us for the downtime yesterday. We have our own dedicated servers but they're not shoved in the back of our office but are located in a data centre in Manchester in NW England (we're in NE England) and the physical management is covered by 34sp.com who we pay for that service whilst we control the software remotely.
Well yesterday a little after noon UK time we got a call from a client saying their website was down. So we checked it out or in reality didn't as we couldn't get on the server nor on our own site which is located on a server in that data centre. Checking on the 34sp status page (http://status.34sp.com/) at that time was impossible as their site was down also and their phone lines were permanently engaged. A short while later their site was back online with their status page telling us that there was a fibre break - the detail is still on the status page.
Later we found out that the problem was a failed management card in the data centre and there was no replacement available. Then when one was delivered it was the wrong one but eventually a full service was resolved some 11 hours later. Hopefully Messrs. Laurel & Hardy have been sacked and 34sp.com have replaced them with some decent technical staff. They also didn't do themselves any favours by their lack of updates online via their status page and twitter feed with their tweets only appearing when some of their clients, myself included, were making many public tweets about their poor customer service and the fact that their competitors were picking this up and contacting us.
Obviously a large part of our day was taken up with dealing with our clients who were understandably concerned re the lack of website and/or email. Luckily we have a pretty understanding bunch of clients who trust us but it's not helped when events beyond our control cause problems and then our providers seem to be telling porkies or didn't understand the problem - we shall see if any compensation is forthcoming (I'm not holding my breath) but if they provide us with a month's free server management we will pass this on to our clients with a month's free hosting - though not to those who weren't affected I should point out, i.e. some e-commerce sites whose servers were not affected.
Where there are problems with individual domains (e.g. where the owner has forgotten to renew) we will contact the owners. If there are more general issues such as server moves or server maintenance then we normally post a message on our site plus an email out to all clients. In such instances we will also post on our Twitter account http://twitter.com/IanE1111 which will also provide a source of information when we have no other avenue, like yesterday - so please make a note of that. Why not follow us on Twitter anyway and read even more of my nonsense?
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