Web Hosting Downtime.

How often is your hosting company up? We do pretty good around here, especially since we switched our server over to a local data center several years ago. We used to use Alabanza and decided to quit using them after we were down for the better part of a day and a half. They said it was due to some big fire in Baltimore and it melted a bunch of fiber somewhere.

I get emailed this article from a friend yesterday. It seems that our old hosting vendor Alabanza had decided to move it's servers from Baltimor to Andover. No big deal right. A virtual migration would be in order and it should go off without a hitch. In this case, that would be too easy. Here's the sad part. After 110 Hours of downtime only 60% of the server are up and running. That translates into more that 80,000 websites are still not up after almost 5 days. No website AND if their email was tied to their hosting account, which most are, they have been without email for almost 5 days as well.

BUT WAIT it gets better. It seems that they "...thought the virtual move was taking far too long so (they) yanked the servers out of the Baltimore facilities, tossed them into trucks and headed to Andover...where nobody was prepared for an actual physical migration. Because the original plan was for a virtual migration. No plans. No strategy. Just toss the things into a truck and drive and hope that someone would figure out what to do once the servers arrived in Andover."

WOW, I don't know what to say. I wonder how many customers they are going to loose after this debacle. If you have excellent uptime on your website, be thankful that you have a good hosting provider.

Have a good weekend everyone.