Our Web hosting debacle

What a crappy week this has been. We’ve had a Web server with Dinix.com for going on 2 years. Overall they’ve been a great company to host with, but in the later part of last year some some strange things started showing up. Then we heard that Dinix had been either bought out our merged with Web Hosting Plus (WHP). The new owners assured as business would go on as usual and they had lots of experience in these takeovers and migrating our servers. So far so good.

Early March we were informed that the Dinix facility was being moved to Forth Worth (from New Jersey) later in the month. The good news was there would be minimal downtime as they were going to move all of our data over the wire to the new facility. Other folks with other types of servers were told they were in for a 13 hour downtime while their servers were trucked cross country. We were told that we would be given 7 days notice and be kept up to date continuously during the move. Well guess what! We got 48 hours notice on the Thursday before Easter, hardly enough time to ensure that everyone had reliable off-server and off-site backups. That’s when the grumbles really started.

So the big move starts on Friday evening. The first change to plans was our server wasn’t being moved electronically but was going in the truck. So ok I guess we can live with 13 hours downtime. But that wasn’t meant to be. Things just kept going from bad to worse. There was next to zero communications from either Dinix or WHM. Thirteen, then twenty four hours passed and no sign of our servers coming back on line! And this was the Easter break where lots of folks had plans to go away with family, not sit worrying about their Web servers and all of their customers reliant on the services those servers delivered.

Well finally some 32 hours later our server came back on line. All I can say is we were one of the very lucky ones. As of today there appears to be servers that are still down and others that are performing like slugs.

Many companies use Dinix and companies like them to build and host their businesses. Without their servers running they have no business, and their customers start to desert them. This is an absolute disaster for so many and my heart goes out to them.

Again we were lucky. Our customers weren’t affected too badly and our downtime could have been far worse.

As soon as our server came on-line we moved everything across to a new well established hosting company. Anyone whose had to move web hosting companies knows this isn’t trivial. So we’ve blown most of the past week and the Easter break chasing our tails because of in my opinion the gross incompetence of WHP.

For those interested in reading more about this sorry tail read this thread. You need to register at Web Hosting Talk to access the thread but that will only take a minute. At last glance the thread was 132 ugly pages long.

When I researched Web hosts prior to the move to Dinix I finished up with a short list of two. As of this week I’m with the second one on that list. Isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing.

For folks that did experience problems accessing our sites this past week now you know why. It is also possible that e-mails you may have sent never reached us. So if you have e-mailed us and haven’t got a reply please re-send the e-mail.