IP Democracy: Our Sites Are Back Up! Navisite Is In for a Rough Ride

If anybody has recommendations for a new hosting provider that I can direct people to, I'm all ears. As it turns out, we are in the midst of a redesign (much delayed by me) of all our sites and we're doing some sort of new, flexible, Web 2.0'ish Ruby-on-Rails thing that might not be helpful to most people looking to flee Navisite. Post a comment with recommendations.

Just as I planned to organize a convoy to Navisite's corporate headquarters, our sites came back up! I understand from my developer who is on a 4:00 conference call with the company that many sites are still out and Navisite is still coping with routing issues.

But we're downloading the files as fast as we can in the event the sites go down again. That way we can quickly move to another hosting provider if need be.

Ironically, I began to get phone calls from various reporters this afternoon, who were waking up to what Navisite has done. So, expect a spate of articles post-fact.

There are a lot of lessons to be learned in all of this. First, always keep back-ups of everything away from your web hosting provider. Secondly, losing access to email, client projects, web sites and other Internet-related tools causes a form of insanity.

At no point since Sunday have I felt "OK." I always had this little crazy feeling humming around inside, wondering who was trying to reach me, whether clients would be upset that they didn't receive the stuff I promised, whether I was losing too much ground in my forward-looking efforts (which are already hideously behind schedule anyway.)

Third, I appreciate the vast amount of small businesses that depend on the Internet. Most of the Alabanza customers purchased by Navisite are small businesses or web hosting resellers who service small businesses. A lot of people have felt a lot of pain over the past four days and I've received dozens of emails from folks who lost revenue.

One person estimated that her business lost $20,000 in sales over the past four days, which is a lot of money to a small business owner. More importantly, some of Navisite's customers have lost customers themselves, which is a kind of permanent loss.

Finally, and foremost, there's a big lesson in all of this for Navisite, which, I suspect, is about to go through a world of hurt. The immediate pain will be the rapid loss of customers burned by the migration. There will also be class action lawsuits, no doubt. But the company has tarred its reputation to the point that it too will experience a permanent kind of loss -- opportunity loss, in the form of big corporate customers who will steer clear of the company, and reputational loss, which is extremely hard to ever recoup.

My trip to Boston is now off. If there are others out there with web sites that are still down, and you're in the Boston area or plan to visit Andover, I'd be glad to provide a platform for your retrieval of servers and files from Navisite.

To Navisite customers whose sites and email are still down, I feel your pain.

To my regular readers, again, I apologize for this weird interlude. With no real ability to work on my regular business, my only outlet was this blog. I'll get back to the regular programming schedule tomorrow.

Update: Several folks have commented here, via email and other sites that we got what we deserved for going with a cheap provider and not keeping back-ups separate from the hosting company. Well, Alabanza wasn't a cheap provider -- they were actually on the high end of the scale. One reason they could charge more is because one of their selling points was strong redundancy. They stressed the value of their back-up system, which gave customers comfort in knowing that redundant files were in place in case of a hacker attack. No one, however, guessed that Alabanza/Navisite itself would be the cause of the problem, so these criticisms are slightly off the mark. Be that as it may, as Navisite as shown, you can't trust your hosting provider to create redundancy in the event of a crisis.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on November 6, 2007 4:40 PM to IP Democracy