IP Democracy: Navisite: Only 60% of Servers Up After 110 Hours

In the latest Navisite (Nasdaq: Navi) news, the unbelievably incompetent web hosting provider has finally proffered some statistics about the devastation that the company's indifference has wrought for thousands of small businesses. In a post earlier tonight (which is no longer there), the famed Mark Clayman (has anybody actually talked to this guy?) said:

We have now mitigated all outstanding issues that were holding up progress and are steadily bringing up more servers live. More than 60% of the servers are now on line, and we currently estimate that all servers will be live within the next 24 hours.

So, in other words, more than 80,000 web sites are still down fully 110 hours after Navisite's incredibly botched decision to physically relocate Alabanza's servers from Baltimore to Andover, in direct contradiction of what they told customers they would do in the first place. Remember, we all thought that the move would be a "virtual" one.

But, apparently, Navisite thought the virtual move was taking far too long so it yanked the servers out of the Baltimore facilities, tossed them into trucks and headed to Andover...where nobody was prepared for an actual physical migration. Because the original plan was for a virtual migration.

No plans. No strategy. Just toss the things into a truck and drive and hope that someone would figure out what to do once the servers arrived in Andover. I'm speculating, of course, on what Navisite was actually thinking.

The company itself doesn't explain why it made the decision it did or whether it was prepared to implement the hideous plan B that it extemporaneously devised. (I highly suspect the decision to yank the servers and hit the highway had something to do with saving a buck or two. The answer as to whether Navisite was prepared to implement plan B is, by now, screamingly and obviously no.)

I would even hazard a guess that a good chunk of the servers that have been brought up have only been made live on the Internet within the past 24 hours, far past the point at which most Navisite customers could have emerged from this whole mess unscathed. I've received phone calls and emails all day from desperate, hollow sounding small business owners and web hosting resellers asking for advice, or to let me know of their dire situations, or to find out what I know. Tracking down my phone number hasn't been the easiest thing in the world either, so that just shows how awful people feel.

Why have I received these phone calls and emails? Because I've been blogging about the situation. And because Navisite is still not answering customers' phone calls or emails.

One man called me this morning to say that his business, which entailed 1,000 web sites directly hosted by Navisite, is now dead. Navisite hasn't returned any of his phone calls. Or emails. And despite promising to bring top management into the endless, useless conference calls Navisite has been hosting since last Sunday, this man told me that he had been on a call all morning...but no one from Navisite chose to participate.

And yet, and yet...the company proclaims great sympathy for the people whose lives it has messed up. In an interview with CNET reporter Elinor Mills, Rathin Sinha, chief marketing officer at NaviSite, said he was sorry for the customer service problems and that the company was doing everything it could to ameliorate the situation.

InfoWorld's Paul Venezia aptly summed up the situation. Navisite's disastrous and truly horrible, no good, devastating (are there any more words for the awfulness that has occurred) indifference, incompetence, irresponsibility has gone "from a tragedy to a farce and back again."

The mainstream press is finally starting to pick up what Navisite has done. But it's too late for so many people.

I'm doing fine now. My servers are up. My sites are functioning and I can proceed. But I feel just terrible for the folks who continue to comment, ask questions, feed me information, call and post on this blog about the traps they are caught in. These are desperate people watching years worth of work go down the drain. And Navisite won't return their phone calls.

The company's utter arrogance -- and refusal to apologize -- is the icing on this absurd cake. Earlier tonight, "Mark Clayman" had the temerity to make a comment to the effect that, looking on the bright side, the sites that are up are functioning better than ever. (This statement is no longer up on Navisite's web site. I wished I had preserved it for posterity's sake. Ed note: statement found and is in update below.) That's like saying, looking on the bright side of things, the deck chairs on the Titanic were the best that money could buy. Who gives a crap.

They just don't get it. They just don't understand what they have done to so many people. To everybody whose sites and email are still down, I'm sorry for you all.

Update: The great Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe, who moderated the closing panel for us last week at The New Video Summit, has this piece today in which Navisite's Sinha describes the problems as "hiccups." Geez...

Update: Ahh...I found "Mark Clayman's" quote about how much better things are for companies that have been brought up online. Someone posted it on a bulletin board.

It is worth noting that for the clients that have been brought back online, we have been hearing that the performance of the environment has improved vs. the Baltimore environment. This was part of the rationale for the migration.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on November 7, 2007 10:37 PM to IP Democracy