More Than WE Know

It’s not even October yet but I feel like I’ve already gotten my first Halloween Scare!!

As you all know, I recently moved this blog to a permanent domain host HostICan.  It had been recommended as a good site to work with Wordpress the software I use and had a good reputation as having good availability and service.

Last week the Support team at HostICan notified me that the site would be down for a maintenance window from Friday 11 pm EST through Saturday 6 am EST. They suggested putting a notice about the outage on the site. I asked them whether readers would be able to view the site during that time and they said it was best to put it up early but didn’t elaborate on what the readers would see. They suggested putting a notice about the outage on the site.

I opted not to put up the notice, assuming that HostICan would have some type of generic message about maintenance during that time which would suffice. I didn’t want to call more attention to the site being down than was necessary.   

I also assumed that the maintenance window they provided was the maximum range they expeted the site to be down, and that in all likelihood their scheduled maintenance would take less than 7 hours which is a very large window.

But to my horror when I logged on yesterday morning, 3 hours after the window was supposed to close - my website was nowhere to be found!! When I attempted to go there, I was told that no site existed!!  When I attempted to go to HostICan - that site didn’t exist either!

First, I panicked - you see I hadn’t backed up my site before their scheduled maintenance. The last backup I had was the one that I did before moving the site a week ago!! 

Second, I realized that I had copies of recent posts in a feed, so I could recreate them if needed. But I was still dismayed because I wouldn’t be able to recreate any comments that had come in!

Third, I tried to contact customer service. But I had never written the number down!  It’s listed on the HostICan website, but of course that was missing! I did have the Support center’s email address from their previous emails to me so I knew I could email them. But I really wanted to call someone and yell about the fact that my site was missing!

In the end, I opted not to contact customer support while the entire host was down.

1) This was not a small problem they needed to be made aware of - I was sure they were already aware of the problem.  

2) They didn’t need to take resources away from solving the root cause of the problem to focus on my site, which after all was only a symptom of the larger issue

3) I knew I wouldn’t believe any assurance the support system gave me about my site being restored properly, until I actually saw it anyway - so nothing was to be gained by asking for reassurances

I’ve spent a career working in technologies and I had a good sense for what was going on behind the scene at HostICan right about then - tired, overworked, stressed out technicians working feverishly to resolve whatever issues was preventing their process from working, trying to be creative under the pressure of knowing they were potentially damaging their company’s brand as well as the brands of the businesses they support, and deciding whether they were just on the brink of success or needing to admit defeat and implement their fallback plan.  

I have a lot of respect for software technicians and just had to assume that HostICan had hired good ones.

So, do I regret my decision to move here? Am I going to jump ship to another provider?

At the moment, I am standing by my decision. HostICan has a good reputation and a good track record. You can click on this picture  to see a chart from RealMetrics.com. This site tracks the actual availability of all providers and presents unbiased results. Over 110,000 tests per day are performed on real accounts to determine the results. You can find  even more detailed charts and trend analysis on RealMetrics. Suffice to say HostICan is still a good value in tterms of availability, price and ease of use.  

So, what can I do in the future? 

• First, I should have backed up my site; I should do it every week but also before any scheduled maintenance. That was definitely an oversight on my part.
• Second, I’ll consider notifying readers about upcoming maintenance - especially if I get feedback from readers that they would have liked it; I’m still not sure whether it will drive more people away in anticipation of a problem than would occur naturally.
• Third, I will add HostICan support to my contact information instead of assuming that their site will be available.
• Fourth, I will provide feedback to HostICan that they should have had a plan for communicating with their customers when things went awry. I’m assuming that even their email servers were down - which I have to say makes me question the viability of their implementation plan….
• Fifth, I will continue to monitor my support from HostICan and compare it to other service providers to ensure that I am getting high quality service.

What have been your experiences with web hosting? Have you had availability issues? How did you decide which hosting service to go with?

(photo. Michal Napartowicz )

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