Lessons to be learned from Typhoon move

[monkey]

Hi,

We've been messed up by the move from Typhoon to Gloucester. If I hadn't checked my email on Monday morning before heading off on-site we'd have been even worse. I asked the support chat service for the email of a real person and fired off an email with my issues but haven't even had any acknowledgment. I hope this is because someone's looking into it rather than ignoring it.

The key problem stems from the fact that we weren't notified in advance of the move. I received two emails at 00:15 and 00:17am on monday morning respectively informing me that our web hosting had been moved already. Of course I was in bed at that time. So at 6am I woke up as I had to go and see a client and briefly checked my email before leaving. Big mistake. My domains are not hosted with eukhost - we made a conscious decision to keep domain hosting separate after problems with our previous hosting provider and this policy will not change for business reasons. I ended up being late for my appontment as I had to reconfigure DNS to point at the new IP address for our domains. If hadn't have pulled my email down to check on the train then I wouldn't have been able to reconfigure DNS till yesterday evening.

I'd like to stress that I'm not having a go at anyone about this, this is a lessons learns post not something meant to put anyone on the defensive.

So, lessons learned:

1) I appreciate that major changes can be made at midnight on sunday night. This is not a problem. However our dedicated hosting provider sends us update notification in advance of a change on this scale. As in days in advance. They do this for shared hosting. If I'd have known on Friday I could've done this over the weekend. Please can you make this happen in the future. Email is a basic business requirement for us.

2) The support chat people tried to be as helpful as possible and gave me what appeared to be a real person's email address but I got no response, nothing. It's not helpful. You guys should take some action on this front but I'm not quite sure what.

3) Hostnames would be useful in the email, DPS are not alone on this one but I think you guys have a handle on this.

Thanks for this,

Steve

[eUKhost.com]

Thanks for your suggestions !

Our new Servers were configured on Saturday as we were not sure about future of Firefly. Typhoon was also running with high load 24x7 so the CPUs were overheated.

Finally our support staff got the data migrated on new servers and changed DNS to avoid any sort of mishap. I was the only Sales Team member to work on Sunday so I had to quickly fire an email to customers of respective servers.

If you had made DNS changes even in the morning then it would have taken less than 1 hour for the changes to propagate. You can have your domain registered anywhere but your nameservers should point to our servers.

We've seen problems previously when we tried to send prior notifications to customers and that time allowed for customers was critical for servers. Now we know what situation can end life of a server so we have to take steps accordingly.

you should be happy now as there's absolutely no load on your new server.

[DPS Computing]

Good to hear that the new server isn't having the same load problems as the old one - at least that will lead to increased reliability and less likelyhood of problems in the future.