Archive for June, 2008

Recently The Planet, a large web hosting company that has numerous data centers, experienced an explosion in their H1 Data Center.   At one point over 9,000 servers were offline.  Thankfully Missing Arrow Publishing does not have any servers in this data center and does not have any clients who use this data center for their hosting.

As you can imagine The Planet has had to do a lot of work to get their H1 Data Center back online and help repair their image. Douglas Erwin, CEO of the Planet, recently announced the compensation for customers affected by the outage.  They ended up offering affected customers two months of free service and 10% on new services for the rest of the year.  Most customers were expecting one month free, so the second was a surprise.

While it was good that they went above and beyond their customers expectations, there was a twist.  The second month of free service won’t be until December!  Why would they do that?  Why not get it out of the way right now?  Some are saying it was to keep their cashflow up in the short term, I have to disagree.  They did it to keep customers from jumping ship!  Customers who were looking to leave might stick around to get their free month of service in December.  If The Planet can keep them until December, they probably aren’t going to leave.  Very smart if you ask me.

If you are in the web hosting business, this should serve as a reminder for the need of local backups, offsite DNS, load balanced servers in different geographical areas, your customers contact data, and a lot of caffeine!