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 at 4:40 PM | Print | Comments (30)Update: My plan is to land at Logan Airport tomorrow at 10:33 or so and grab a rental car and head out to Andover. One person affected by this outage, a web reseller, has wonderfully asked to come along and I could use the company. If anybody else wants to meet in Boston for the ride to Andover, let me know (please email msbrumfield@gmail.com given that our new email service is Microsoft Exchange-based and this is all new to me.)
As I strategize for my trip to Andover (I still can't believe I've been reduced to begging for my site files, in person, and am trying to figure out how to leave today and not tomorrow morning), I'm posting information for all the people whose sites are still down due to Navisite's (Nasdaq: Navi) unbelievable mismanagement of the Alabanza server migration.
It's clear that Navisite isn't going to bring in the right technical help until it feels so much heat that it has to. To my amazement, the mainstream press still hasn't picked up on this story and I can only wonder the heck is going on. (Kudos to Karl at BroadbandReports, Dan Goodin at The Register, and Web Hosting Industry News for stumbling onto this story.) I keep hoping that the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, or, even better, CNET or TechWeek, will discover that tens of thousands of people are trapped by Navisite's five-day outage and can practically do nothing but watch their businesses go up in smoke.
Once that happens, Navisite's investors will send a potent signal to the company to clean up its act. In the meantime, all any of us can do is continue to put pressure on the company. It may not help, but here's a list of Navisite's top investors. Call or email (or in a few cases, send snail mail) to make sure they know what's going at Navisite and how the precipitous loss of customers and revenues are damaging their investments.
| Top Institutional Investors in Navisite | ||
|---|---|---|
| Institution Name | Shs Held | Contact Information |
| Janus Capital Management LLC | 3,515,845 | institutional@janusintech.com |
| RS Investments | 1,515,959 | funds@RSinvestments.com |
| Tremblant Capital Group | 998,056 | 767 Fifth Avenue, Floor 12A, New York, New York 10153 |
| Delaware Investments | 956,700 | 215-255-1200 |
| Essex Investment Management Co., L.L.C. | 714,488 | info@essexinvest.com |
| Federated Investors, Inc. | 670,773 | 1-800-432-5119 |
| Cortina Asset Management L.L.C. | 484,371 | (414) 225-7399 |
| Neuberger Berman, LLC | 472,100 | Eric Johnson 399 Park Avenue (5th Floor) New York, NY 10022 |
| Thomson Horstmann & Bryant, Inc. | 450,800 | (201) 368-2770 gburrell@thbinc.com |
| Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC | 437,757 | +41 44 333 11 11 |
| Wellington Management Company, LLP | 322,860 | +1-617-951-5000, info@wellington.com |
| Sterling Johnston Capital Management, L.P. | 268,700 | info@sterlingjohnston.com, (415) 477-2300 |
| Baron Capital Management, Inc. | 232,500 | info@baronfunds.com 212-583-2000 |
| Ridgecrest Investment Management, L.L.C. | 220,000 | 973-544-6970, kaushal@ridgewoodgrp.com |
| Caxton Associates, L.L.C. | 205,945 | (609) 419-1800 |
OK, so it turns out that someone else had the same idea -- show up at Navisite's headquarters to retrieve their servers, but Navisite wouldn't let the guy in. That was the word in one of Navisite's many conference calls today, but Navisite personnel are no longer participating in these calls.
In fact, our emails and phone calls have gone unreturned over the past day.
I'm going to call Navisite to let them know I'm coming to Andover to copy our data off the servers (as it turns out, the servers don't technically belong to us.) I'll let you know what they say.
Update: Navisite hung up on me! I called to let someone at the company know we would be showing up in Andover to copy our data off the servers and was transferred to technical support. When I attempted to explain to the man who answered the phone that we are coming to Andover and don't expect to be turned away, he said that Navisite is opening up a new bridge at 1:00 pm and that we should join this conference call instead. When I explained that we had been on these conference calls since Sunday to no avail, he again tried to persuade me to join a conference call. When I interrupted him, he said "let me finish my damn sentence." I asked his name. He hung up on me.
So, it looks like this is really going to happen. We're going to Andover. In true Michael Moore fashion, I'll bring a webcam and post the results here. Hey, I got nothing else to do.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:39 PM | Print | Comments (6)A bit of dark humor: I just got off the phone with my developer who suggested that the "worst-case" scenario is for him to fly to Boston, drive to Andover and physically retrieve the servers from Navisite so that we can obtain the back-up files. The mental image of this situation is quite amusing indeed.
I apologize to my regular readers for obsessing on the incredible, unbelievable failures of web hosting provider Navisite (Nasdaq: Navi). This has been one of the worst experiences of my professional career and so many things are popping for me right now, and so many people are trying to reach me, and Navisite has screwed up so many things for me at exactly the wrong time.
The status of Navisite's migration efforts: who knows? According to the company, it's making "progress" in bringing up the several hundred thousand web sites that it was responsible for, a line the company has been handing out since Saturday, so I have no faith that anything will happen today, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. I wouldn't be surprised if Navisite didn't keep up this "problems will be solved soon" routine for weeks or months. I half-way suspect that Navisite believes if it just continues to offer the "any minute now" excuse, customers will simply melt away and they don't have to explain to anyone that they don't know how to bring up websites.
All I can do is set aside everything else I had on my agenda for this week and next week and rebuild my business, which totally and irretrievably sucks. At this point, I'm not even sure we can retrieve any of our files from Navisite, which is important because our back-ups were unfortunately on the servers the company is now holding hostage -- Alabanza supposedly had an excellent reputation for maintaining back-ups.
If blogging is light here, that's because I have more pressing things to do.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:19 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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