Musings from a small IPP

Sometimes I wonder when I get requests like this, especially from customers on a very basic hosting package.  Initially it might seem a perfectly reasonable request, but it does not work for multiple customers, and each customer’s follow-up is inevitably a request that would take several hours to achieve.

Now let’s just think what the outage might be, be it a router failure losing connexion, or an Internet storm, typically these things are about 3 hours duration.  If we are to arrange to call the customers, even at 5 minutes each, we’ll have barely started with just 36 calls per line, and have achieved nothing, by the time it all comes back.  If the failure is our equipment that time would be better spent configuring a replacement and getting it on site.

So the answer is “No, it’s not in your, or our other customers’ best interest.  If it really is an issue for you, would you like to talk about multi-site redundant servers?”

The only way the customer is going to get that sort of personal response is when their hosting fees go up by three orders of magnitude, effectively having their own dedicated full time support person.