Goodbye Interland!

On Thursday April 6, 2001, Interland decided to move our Laridian (www.laridian.com) Web site to a new server without saying anything in advance. The site was down most of Thursday night and Friday. Friday night it looked like we were back in business.

And a good thing, too. We had been down something like 30 hours in the first five days of April. That's not good.

Our joy turned out to be short-lived. On Friday night we figured out we couldn't take credit cards. Interland hadn't finished installing CyberCash, our credit card processing component. We called Interland tech support (24x7 and toll-free, thank goodness). We were shocked to find out that the group that handles e-commerce issues does not work weekends.

How does a company that advertises 24x7 tech support get away with not supporting e-commerce at night and on weekends? I haven't yet received an answer to that question. The best they could do is say, "Yes, we have 24x7 support" and "No, the e-commerce group does not work weekends."

We lost several days of sales in early April. For a small company like ours that's a big deal. So we made arrangements on Monday morning to move www.laridian.com to another hosting company.

Jump ahead a couple days. It's Thursday, April 13, 2001 and suddenly www.craigr.com is down. I call Interland's 24x7 tech support and find out they're moving my site to another server (no advance notice). 48 hours later the site finally comes back up, but with no FrontPage support. Fortunately we were able to get that fixed relatively quickly.

Enough's enough! Tonight I moved www.craigr.com to my own hosting company (www.justanotherhost.net). At least this way if it goes down it's my own fault and I'll be able to notify myself in advance.