StableHost – Blog

We’ve worked with a certain provider many times throughout the last few years; they’ve hosted external services for us that we’ve used internally that needed to be outside our network. This post isn’t to slam this provider, in fact we won’t be naming the provider, however the lesson we learned that day was critical to us and we’re making sure our customers never experience the same lesson as we did.

It’s 1AM, we started to get paged regarding a certain internal service that was down, this particular service was hosted on a VPS at another provider’s network. We opened up a ticket with them as many of our own customers would do and the first response we received was “It’s not down, it’s just slow”. While that answer may be perfectly acceptable in certain situations, when we can’t ping or ssh into the server at all, it doesn’t matter if it’s “just slow”, it’s down for us and that’s all that matters. We replied back letting them know not only was it “not slow, but completely down” we didn’t hear back for quite some time.

We jumped on their live chat a few hours later and asked what’s going on, their response was ‘we’re working on it, no eta’. Few hours later, we replied to our ticket again asking for an update, no response.

12 hours later, our server is accessible again.

To this date, we have not yet received a response from them as to what happened, no apology, nothing.

So, what did we learn from this?

• Downtime will happen regardless! It doesn’t matter if you’re Joe’s Small Hosting Company or Google. You will have outages big and small, computers have a limited time span before they finally fail on you.

• Communication during an outage is #1. We’ve learned customers are a lot more understanding knowing what’s being done to bring the server back up, even if they don’t exactly understand the “tech lingo”. There should be status updates via twitter and facebook at least hourly and constant updates to support tickets. No communication during an outage is the worst thing you can do, however it’s also the easiest thing to do as you’re busy fixing the server, the last thing you want to do is update people on the status. We believe, in our situation, the entire server had to be restored and in that case 10+ hours is perfectly acceptable as there’s a lot of work to be done, however without any updates from the company you automatically assume the worst.

• Follow up with customers after the fact, be truthful and learn from your mistakes. If your customers have been down for the past few hours, they deserve some kind of notification letting them know what happened, why it happened and what you’re going to do to prevent it from happening again.

You can run the perfect company in terms of pricing, support, have a great looking website and so on, however if you forget the simple things such as communication when it matters most, you’re not going to succeed in this business.