How Unplanned Downtimes ruin your Reputation

Author: ArunDatacenter problems can lead to unexpected downtimes and can in turn affect your reputation badly. Web hosting provider Navisite found this out recently when they had a datacenter consolidation project that went horribly wrong. They encountered unexpected problems during server migration between their datacenters. This resulted in lots of their clients' websites going offline. Some of these sites were down for around six or more days!!

No wonder then, Navisite users were a furious lot. Their anger is understandable since no one would want their sites to be down for such a lengthy period of time. From a Techworld report,

The length of the outages prompted some NaviSite clients to vow in forum postings that they would switch to other hosting vendors once they could retrieve their data. Others threatened class-action lawsuits, and New York-based law firm Wolf Popper LLP confirmed that it was looking into possible legal action after being contacted by NaviSite clients.

To their credit though, Navisite have restored around 90% of websites. Techworld has full coverage of the problem here. This incident is yet another proof that website uptime cannot be taken for granted. Even leading web hosts with very good infrastructure such as Navisite can have problems. It is always better to monitor your web sites with an external web site monitoring service and get notified when there are problems with your sites.