Alright, I need some help. After having a dedicated server with ACSDatanet, which was bought out by port80, things were ok for a while, but my server has now been down for 26 hours. On top of that, I have only managed to snag a human on the phone once out a LOT of calls to their office. :angry:

Ok, I know they're busy, and I let off them the first 14 hours. But after they told me they would call me "right back" and I waited 1.5 hours (this was after leaving a few messages nicely requesting that someone give me an update on the outage), I've gotten frustrated. Actually, I think I've done darn good - I waited until 26 hours of downtime to actually leave a fairly rude message on their machine.

So, my question for you web gurus -
a) what can I do to get them to call me back?
b) what reasonable means are there for getting my data back?
c) My SLA of 5 9s is obviously shot, but if you were in this position, what other recourse?
d) Based on this, I'm considering co-lo. Is this going to help alleviate these types of things?

TIA
Linda

There's really nothing you can do to make someone call you. Hopefully they will communicate with you better, but that is a very long time to not have thus far. Don't worry too much yet and assume that you'll not be able to get you data. You should have a backup, but even so, I would assume that they will (at some point) get the server up and hopefully there wasn't a hardware failure where your data is gone, especially if you didn't have a backup or another local system backup.

Try again every 4 or 6 hours and just tell them you'd like either an update or ETA, if at all. There's nothing to come from being too persistent and they might ignore you. Try and be pleasant to them, even if they are jerking you around or taking their time or not communicating. It's for the best that way, even if it might not help, it won't hurt.

Hopefully the server will be back up soon and you will have a fully operational site to where you can use it again without problems, or be able to easily move the data to another provider. Good luck.

Fortunately, I do have most of a backup, and I've tried to overall be somewhat pleasant. You had great advice, although currently 27 hours of downtime is just ridiculous to me.

Linda

Agreed that 27 hours is too long, and much less than that is too long already. Certainly. Some hardware issues can cause long downtimes, but to not communicate with the client suffering the downtime to at least say "we're still working on it", "It seems that _this_ happened", or "We haven't determined the problem and are investigating it", or even "We didn't have time to deal with it today, we went home to go to sleep, we'll update you tomorrow", or something to let you have _some_ type of idea, is the big problem here.

I agree that's unacceptable when a company should be dealing with something and had it fixed within that amount of time, that they at least need to let you know they acknowledge your existence, you're concerned about your server and that they can let you know they are too and are at least _trying_ to do something to get it back up, even if it's bad news. I don't understand how some people just don't seem to get it? The key to any company is service, and customer service.

I've seen more companies that lack in skills and abilities prosper from being kind and friendly to their clients, than one's that are highly technically skilled that are rude or ignore their clients. Finding both skills and customer friendly companies seems to be a challenge these days. It's pretty obvious stuff, and still things like this above go on somehow in this world anyway. Why they couldn't call you to give you an update, it's just inexcusable. Unless they wrote down your number wrong, or you didn't leave it clearly, and they can't contact you at any email address other than the one they have for you on your server (I suppose that is a possible scenario), then I couldn't imagine they have a good reason to not get back to you at all within this duration.