Server Outage

Submitted by jbreland on Wed, 10/01/2008 - 16:23

All of Legroom.net was offline from Monday through Wednesday morning. This is because my truly dumbass server colocation provider:

  1. sold me a new colo plan hosted in a data center that was being shut down
  2. neglected to warn me at the time of sale that it was being sut down
  3. neglected to warn me at any point before it was shut down, taking out my server in the process
  4. disconnected technical support / customer service numbers for the data center
  5. failed to mention the shutdown on their website and network status pages (which, btw, was also broken at the time)
  6. failed to respond to the urgent ticket I had submitted about the mysterious server outage in any reasonable amount of time
  7. when they did finally respond, about ten hours later, sent the reply to my e-mail address hosted on the very server that was shut down

Once I finally got someone on the phone, and was informed of the extremely unexpected data center shutdown, I was told that all servers were being moved to their Dallas data center facility. All Chicago customers were supposed to have been notified 60 days ago of the move, which didn't do me a whole lot of good as I wasn't yet a customer 60 days ago. Not that it stopped them from selling service in that data center anyway. Fucktards.

So the server was supposed to be available again Tuesday afternoon. Needless to day, Tuesday afternoon, evening, and night all passed, and still no server. Finally I called again Wednesday morning to see wtf was going on, and was told that the server had already been powered up (since about 9:30pm Tuesday night, according to my logs), but nobody bothered to connect a damn ethernet cable.

Again, fucktards.

Everyone I spoke with during this ordeal (once I finally figured out how to get in contact with them) was polite and seemed genuinely surprised and regretful that I had not been contacted about the relocation, and moving an entire data center in two days is no easy task, so it's hard for me to be upset with them on that level. But the complete and utter lack of notification, the fact that I was sold a plan in a data center that was already scheduled to be shutdown, and the apparently lack of competence necessary to connect an ethernet cable to bring the server back online is just flat out unacceptable.

Alright, I'm finished my rant. For now. Just wanted to let everyone know what happened. With any luck (well, a lot of luck with these people), Legroom.net stay online without any more unexpected outages.