It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way……

Apologies to Charles Dickens for appropriating his classic opening paragraph but the words could also be the operations guide for DigitalBeat.Com’s former web hosting company. The web host was acquired by a larger company about a year ago and seems to be on a mission to trim its customer base.
Their lack of planning lost them many customers last summer when what was supposed to be a three hour data center consolidation turned into as much as a week outage for many of its acquired customers. Then last December they decided that the DigitalBeat physical servers were too old to support their current offerings and the site would be moved to a newer server, again minimal downtime and transparent to DigitalBeat. They made the move on a Friday afternoon. The site was down until the following Monday. Calls to their technical support revealed that they basically had no staff that could actually do anything available on the weekends – by Saturday afternoon we had determined that their DNS configurations for the server and database were pointing to incorrect IP addresses so we basically had no service for 3 days until a real tech support person showed up in their office the following Monday to make the maybe 10 second change.

Now, the last week of May, we were again down for most of the week – numerous calls over the first 12-15 hours got nowhere – they did not answer their phones and then when customer service finally came around there was no information (other than we’re working on the problem) for two more days.

Thankfully we had pulled DNS management into our control after the December outage and by the time our former host had come back up we had rebuilt the DigitalBeat site on new servers with our new hosting company Dotable (much thanks to Aussie Bob and the Dotable team who actually understand what it means to be a service business and have been invaluable in getting the site up and running). We switched DNS to the Dotable servers over a week ago and finally dropped our old host yesterday (they weren’t getting any traffic anyway since the Digitalbeat.com name was no longer going to their servers).

To those readers that may be thinking that you get what you pay for well the old host was about 3 to 4 times MORE expensive than Dotable, our new host, and provided far fewer features and lets just say that Dotable has real tech support while the old host never really figured out that answering a phone and writing a trouble ticket was not the same thing as service provisioning and that documenting an issue did not replace competent skills, planning, and effective administration.