Nov 24, 2009
When loyalty just ain’t enough
Yesterday, Dreamhost went down and my main landscape architecture site worldlandscapearchitect.com (gets 15000/month visitors) is still down and its on a Virtual Private Server which I pay good money for every month. I have been with Dreamhost since 2006 and have used them hosting and domain registration for 90% of my domain names, but recently they have been having real issues and my site has been down several times for over 2-3 hours and usually it has come back with intervention from me. I have sent support tickets in and last week I got a general we are sorry we have been moving the racks on the network around for the last week email from the manager. However, yesterday afternoon the whole dreamhost network went down – not just shared hosting but the whole network. My shared hosted sites are back but worldlandscapearchitect.com is still down. I am left with a quandry do I move or stay loyal, I make little if any money off the site however, I think that over Xmas I will move all my sites to two different companies – one in Hong Kong for my china sites and a VPS host in USA for the main sites.
Have you experienced this situation with a company before? Did you think that companies respond to this appropriately or is it part of some ingrain problems with management so it will continue?
If your company is moving location or changing the way it deals with customers have you informed them ahead of time?Do they know how to contact you during a crisis? Do you have a Plan C for your Plan B?
Does your company have a disaster/contingency plan if your suppliers leave you in crisis? Does your company have a way to deal with your customers during a crisis?
Often customers will stay loyal if its a one off crisis and you communicate with your customers and after the crisis apologise and give some form of reason of why it happened and how you will deal with it so it doesn’t happen again.
However, this time loyalty ain’t enough for me to continue using this host. So, in that vain you may notice over Christmas that my sites will go into maintenance mode for 2-5 days.
Feel free to make comments or answer the questions above with positive or negative experiences you have had.
