I've been trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. I was going to stay on with them when they got things back in order. But now it seems that there is only one guy trying to right the sinking ship. And for some reason he's still taking orders for new clients.

HostPacket was very nice, prompt, and helpful with all my presales questions and also after I signed on with them. They helped me set up my phpbb (I could have done it myself, but it was easier to send an email) and corrected a few mistakes that happened during my setup. But even after the recurring downtime then the complete wiping out of my site...I figured I'd give them a shot to smooth things over.

But there's been no communication since the early weekend. Kevin did email me a response to an email I sent on Thursday. But since sometime on Saturday, I've not seen a post on their forums or on here. I think his tech split on him, and he's treading water in a storm.

I don't want to ditch him when he's at his lowest point, but I have to look out for my site. My site was a message board that focused on high school sports in Mississippi. The HostPacket debacle started Thursday. Guess what this weekend was? Yep, the first official weekend of high school football in Mississippi! And after building a member base that was very active and interested, my mySQL databases get wiped out and now I have no place for my members to talk...and I have no members!

So.....should I hang around a little bit more and hope Kevin gets his stuff straight, or should I go ahead and cancel and hope I can get the board set up again on a new host before this weekend's games?

I've offered to help them contact their customers while their servers are down but so far they have ignored the request. It was within a thread, but this might be an indication of their intention, or not, to ignore the problem?

It's good to have redundancy when problems occur that take more than an hour to resolve. We've recently put in place a very small network in the upper floor of our office to support at least 70% of our websites at 150kbps/site. While this isn't amazing, it's cost-effective and reduced our last major outage in January to only a handful of calls and/or trouble tickets. Problems do arise, and not all can be fixed as quickly as we like. Every provider has dark days. I'm sure HostPacket is trying their best to resolve the outages, but they should have a method of contact other than what resides on the offline machines. Might I suggest Hotmail?

Originally posted by Richard Ward
It's good to have redundancy when problems occur that take more than an hour to resolve. We've recently put in place a very small network in the upper floor of our office to support at least 70% of our websites at 150kbps/site. While this isn't amazing, it's cost-effective and reduced our last major outage in January to only a handful of calls and/or trouble tickets. Problems do arise, and not all can be fixed as quickly as we like. Every provider has dark days. I'm sure HostPacket is trying their best to resolve the outages, but they should have a method of contact other than what resides on the offline machines. Might I suggest Hotmail?


This is proof of a good direction taken by a host, and for that I have a great amount of respect for Mr Ward's statement.

While I wouldn't suggest hotmail,. it is very easy to run a local mail server and contact your customers from within your local network.

Have an emergency support site located on your local network, and mirror the servers locally for backup.