Dear Valued Customer,
As you probably are aware, your site may have experienced uncommonly long downtime over the Easter weekend and since. Most hosting companies, as is the case with Host It Now, do not control an entire data center. Instead, we "hotel" in the data center of a large data center sourcing space to many hosting companies. While Host It Now hosts in several different data centers to reduce risk (the all eggs in one basket philosophy), we did have several servers and over one thousand customers hosted in a data center owned by Dinix.
Dinix was sold last week to "Web Host Plus". A fact that only became known to Dinix hotelling customers last Wednesday. Web Host Plus decided to conduct a data center move from Atlanta, GA to New Jersey via AIR COURIER. This migration was very poorly managed by Web Hosting Plus. Dinix provided Host It Now Networks with a reliable network and sound support for its budget class customers.
They assured us that this move would be seamless, with no data loss and about cost about 8 hours of holiday weekend downtime. It is our belief that Web Host Plus only gave three days notice prior to the move because they did not want to loose any client base. Instead they compromised our customer.s data, websites, and by extension, our relationship and good standing with you, our customers.
Once the equipment arrived in New Jersey and was installed in the racks we were looking at about a 25 hour downtime already! Web host plus provided ETA.s that were .far fetched. and provided phone support from a call center that directed us to email dinixmove@webhostplus.com which in-turn replied to us inaccurate ETA.s
It appears that during the move, Web Host Plus did NOT move our leased servers because they were NOT Dinix assets, but rather the data center that provided Dinix with network and power services. SATA Hard drives from the servers were removed and placed in Web Host Plus machines that were NOT compatible with our SATA drives. After about 24 hours of hard work, we were able to recover the data from all servers except:
SLS-CE5P313.HOSTITNOW.COM . 209.152.182.8 (313)
SLS-CE5P314.HOSTITNOW.COM . 209.152.181.208 (314)
In the time being, we have moved all users off of servers 312 and 315 to our Atlanta facility. We are 65% complete with the move of server 316 and will work to get all users off of 311 ASAP. We will NOT conduct business with a company who has no regard for our customers.
This could have all been prevented if Web Host Plus performed the following:
1.) Given Dinix customers at a MINIMUM of 30 days notice of the move.
2.) Been honest with us... IE letting us know that they were going ship network equipment via Truck courier instead of AIR courier as they had stated
3.) Had the support staff to provide their new customers (Host It Now) with honest up-to-date status so we could in turn offer you our customer more accurate status.
4.) Had tested their server equipment with the SATA drives PRIOR to the move.
Host It Now Networks provides two grades of Hosting. One is business class hosting (through the services of Confidus Group) which provides 100% uptime with a 10 minute/month downtime window per month, with redundant network, very low server load and free backup services. Budget class customers receive extremely affordable hosting service on a fast, but non-redundant network and .self-serve. backup. This is for personal (Non-business) websites. There will always be more risk hosting with the budget class plans. This data loss was avoidable because all budget class services were working properly prior to the move.
While we know that this has been an inconvenience to you (in some cases severe), we are prepared to offer you two free months of hosting and will restore any of the backup archives that you may have created from the .self-serve. backup utility within cpanel.
To have us setup a new account for you, please go to: https://hostitnow.com/2monthsfree.php
Sincerely,
Tim Rice
Host It Now Networks