A planned 12 hour outage is a long time in today's Internet world. But when 12 hours become 4 days and counting with no end in sight and with possibly a 175.000 websites down, it's certainly beyond funny and amusing. I'm thinking about the word class-action...for those still on their feet to join one when this all is over.

What happened to doing dry runs?

I deal with large databases and whenever I need to move them I *always* make sure that the way I'm doing it will work before I pull the plug.

"Losses run into thousands of pounds"

No problem, you simply switch to your backup plan. You know, the one that you have incase one of your suppliers dissapears? You do have a plan don't you?

Or is it a case of thinking "Hmm, I'm paying a single, relatively cheap company to host my business(es) website(s). If there is any significant down time or the company goes bust I'll loose thousands of pounds. Should I invest a little in a second-supplier backup plan? Nah, I'll risk it. Can't see any problem with putting all my eggs in this loverly basket."

And all sites are down again. Over 4 days now. I am in Australia, and a number of other Australians are also affected. This is costing people dearly, worldwide.

Where do we sign up for the class action suit?

They must have used the same company as Server4You did last November.

http://forum.server4you.net/viewtopic.php?t=287

Exact same sort of move, bad communication, bad plan, no backups, dropped servers, corrupted disks, people offline for days, no apology and no compensation.

As a small UK charity we have not had any financial fallout from the debacle of 'NaviBlight's' incompetence. Our heart goes out to all the many businesses that have felt the pinch. However we have nevertheless been effected by loss of email and our presence on the Net.

'NaviBlight' should be publicly hung, drawn and quartered for this appalling mishandling. We are not in a position to afford to sue them and would welcome a class-action lawyer knocking on our door. This so called enterprise class data centre prides itself as being a leader in the field. To quote from the blurb on their website "NaviSite is a trusted advisor committed to ensuring the long-term success of our customers’ business applications and technology strategies." I think there are many like us who could put it slightly differently now.

Finally a word to Andrew Ruhan (Chairman). Being in a similar, but perhaps somewhat more lowly, position than you, do the right thing and publicly apologise to the end-users instead of hiding behind your contracts to the web hosting companies you deal with. Secondly, the moral thing to do as you, like me carry the can whether you like it or not, is to step down. My scepticism however makes me believe that within the corporate world you inhabit, those morals do not exist.

Rebecca Dittman

Chair

The Gender Trust, UK

Valueweb managed to do it too....

http://digg.com/tech_news/How_not_to_migrate_a_data_center

We are suffering from Spain, companies like ours with Noc in Baltimore, the disastrous proceed on the migration of these large companies. In our view, have missed countless technical procedures that were due to take into account when planning this migration so great. We do not understand as in the year 2007, a company the size of Navisite, to incur these errors base, seriously damaging many ISPs worldwide.

Companies like ours, from a country like Spain that is not known by the lateness of its infrastructure, which is why we hosted in the USA, are losing all the credit they have accumulated in the previous ten years, including, of course, distrust of our customers.

But this confidence has been demonstrated in recent days, perhaps because of the quality of service we offer human and non overcrowded with customers' hosting rubbish ", which will fight for continuing to uphold: the best service and the best way .

Encouragement to all those affected (us included).

David Via

WebFactory Internet-CEO

.........................................................................................................................

Estamos sufriendo desde España, empresas como la nuestra con Noc en Baltimore, el desastroso proceder acerca de la migración de estas grandes empresas. A nuestro parecer, se han obviado infinidad de procedimientos técnicos que se debieron tener en cuenta a la hora de planear esta migración tan grande. No entendemos como en el año 2007, una empresa de las dimensiones de Navisite, pueda incurrir en estos errores de base, perjudicando seriamente a muchos ISP en todo el mundo.

Empresas como la nuestra, desde un pais como España que no destaca por lo avanzado de su infraestructura, razón por la cual nos ubicamos en USA, están perdiendo todo el crédito que hemos acumulado en los diez años anteriores, creando, como es lógico, una desconfianza en nuestros clientes.

Pero esta confianza, se ha demostrado en estos últimos días, quizás por la calidad de servicio humano que también ofrecemos y a la no masificación de clientes con "hosting basura", cosa que lucharemos por seguir defendiendo: el mejor servicio y de la mejor manera.

Ánimo a todos los afectados (nos incluimos).

David Via

WebFactory Internet SL - CEO

I had been a client of Alabnaza for over 10 years, and the hundreds of sites and domains that I developed, designed, coded and hosted on their domains were a significant source of my livelihood. My “day job” is with an environmental nonprofit, so let’s just say that supplemental income is a necessity if I ever want my son to go to college. I am at least thankful that my web dev businesses is no longer my SOLE source of income.

What’s worst about this is the fact that most of my clients had become personal friends. Aside from income lost, I fear I am now going to be painted with the same brush of incompetence, lying, and disrepute that now tarnishes NaviSite. I can hardly blame them for feeling that way.

I would like to add my name to the rapidly growing list of Alabanza/NaviSite “customers” interested in pursuing legal action against NaviSite. If you are a NaviSite investor, you should strongly consider bailing out now.

I started a blog concerning OneWorldHosting. It is one of the companies affected by this move. I have no idea whether the number 200,000 is correct for the total accounts affected. However, I would say that potentially 18,000 visitors have been affected by not being able to go to the Aviongoo website (http://www.aviongoo.com) alone over the weekend.

And, Aviongoo is still being negatively affected due to inconsistent email. There is also a mysterious problem that cropped up with another vendor. Does anyone know whether BYETHOST is also affected by the Navisite problems?

Our business saw losses exceeding $20k as a result of this fiasco. I am considering filing my own lawsuit, but will consider joining a class action.

Sharky Laguana

CEO

Bandago

Our company InfoLink IT's Servers have been down since the Saturday.

InfoLink IT's Director has taken legal action against NaviSite and after 20+ phone calls and no return phone calls we were HAD TO TELL NaviSite what they need to do to get our servers up and running.

It is very very very sad when our techs .. where we are a company of only 6 people had to tell a publicly listed company that has over 500 staff how to fix a major catastrophe.

If you are in the same boat as us, YOU NEED TO TELL THEM TO REBOOT THE APACHE ON THE SERVERS. They did not beleive that this would help, but to their surprise, it got all 795 sites that were down live again.

We had 3 servers... one working that only held 10 sites and 2 down, that held almost 800...we have been trying to request the root password for 12hrs which they could not give us because they told me that the tool they use to retrieve this password is BROKEN.

We were very persistent and have been on the phone for over 5hrs today and told them that all they need to do is restart the apache on the servers.. finally after getting escalated to a higher tech level and talking to every Indian in their call center we get onto someone that would actually do what we wanted.

Within 10 seconds of them restarting the apache ALL OUR SITES WERE LIVE AGAIN!

Like quite a lot of Alabanza's customers I am outside the USA, with an international client list of very small businesses, NGOs and charities. I moved my sites from the UK to Alabanza about 10 years ago because of the better connectivity of US data centers and more economic telecomms costs. I stayed with Alabanza because of the good customer service and reliability inspite of the fact that I could have got equivalent hosting in the UK in more recent years.

Looking at Navisite's business history over the last few years, I can only say I am horrified. In the UK and many other European jurisdictions they would have been shut down years ago. I am afraid this has poisoned my view of USA business and I will almost certainly be moving business out of the USA to a somewhat better regulated environment.

Wake up USA - you no longer have the technical and economic advantages in this business and you are going to lose a lot of overseas business unless you clean up your business practises.

Seven Days and Still Counting...

By Steve M

Posted Saturday 10th November 2007 18:14 GMT

The sad part about this train wreck is that you can't talk to anyone who knows anything. At best, you reach someone in India and their response to all questions is "They are working on it". Its unfornuate that the folks in India are taking the all the heat for the NaviSite idiot who orchestrated the so called migration plan.

NavSite's message from CEO Arthur Becker makes it appear everything is back online; just a few bugs left to work out. This is obviously not the case. Prior to that the messages read "we're 75% back on line". What does that mean? How about some news we can use, like when the other 25% is going to back online.

Now, either no one is anwering the phone because the lines are backed up, or everyone went home for the weekend. In either case, this is unacceptable. They need to, at minimium, be posting technical updates, with estimated completion times. It's not the fact that we are down that concerns me, as much as it is when are we going to be back up. On the other hand, maybe they don't want us to know the truth. If we knew what was really going on, we would have moved to another service provider six days ago.

My advice, if I want to have your clients' email running by Monday morning, you better start the moving process today.