Web hosting providers have plenty of issues to think about while running their businesses, like customer churn, security flaws, facility accreditation and keeping up-to-date with the latest technological innovations, one problem that hosting providers desperately try to keep at bay is the unforeseeable outage.
On August 16 at 8:50 a.m. ET Delaware-based web hosting provider HostMySite (hostmysite.com) dealt with just that - the accidental severing of a fiber conduit connecting to its older facility that disconnected approximately 10,000 shared hosting customers, as well as HostMySite’s infrastructure for its Web site.
Rather than taking the evasive route and hiding in the undeniable presence of an outage, HostMySite, a company whose reputation is based on its focus on cheap hosting customer service, decided to do just the opposite and go completely public by posting a page devoted to the outage on the company’s site with hourly updates, photos from location of the fiber being spliced and emails to each customer about the issue.
Lou Honick, CEO of HostMySite, says the decision to be so open about of the outage wasn’t that complicated, as his first priority was to communicate to his customers. But he says being so open didn’t come without its price.
“This is the first thing you think is ‘wow, that’s kind of baring it all for everyone to see,’ and we had competitors try to capitalize on it,” says Honick. “We had competitors sending out internal memos about our outage. I mean there’s still a company out there that posts a link on their Web site that says ‘free three-day trial for HostMySite customers.’ It’s horrible, I know, but I firmly believe that karma is tough in this business. I mean, everybody has problems, we never want to saddle our customers with it, we never want to admit that it happens or that it could happen, but you look at all these big Web hosts that have had outages within the last 12 or 18 months, some of them even a lot more recent, and it happens. I know a lot of companies that want to be evasive about it, but people appreciate honesty and it’s even easier to be public and transparent when its something that is out of your control, like a fiber cut.”
In each of the 10,000 emails HostMySite sent out, Honick included his own contact information so that customers could speak to him directly about the downtime they were experiencing. He says he received well over a thousand responses via email and voicemail, and although some of them were negative, the majority were encouraging.
“When things go wrong it feels great to see that kind of support, and I think it’s a testament to the kind of business we’ve built,” says Honick. “We’ve really always been about customer service, since day one. People and all kinds of businesses say they’re about customer service, but we really are. It’s really part of our culture. I go out to HostingCon and ISPCON and all those places and talk about it all the time. I think the responses we’ve gotten are a testament to what the employees here have done and they’ve delivered great service for a very, very long time. And that earns you a little bit of credit with our customers. But at the same time, I also know that you can’t abuse that and reliability is important and we need to find ways to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
The data center that also suffered the bad outage was scheduled to be shut down in the next 12 to 18 months, but Honick says HostMySite has reconsidered that decision and is looking into what it will take to build the facility up and put redundant systems in place so that in the event of a fiber cut again, customers won’t be impacted.
“We can’t afford to let that be a question again,” says Honick. “You know, we didn’t think it was a possibility with the way our systems were designed, but a lot of fiber systems are old and in the ground. You take it on the faith from your carriers that it’s a redundant ring with no single points of failure, and it doesn’t turn out that way. We knew there was a small area of risk where it came into the building, but that wasn’t even what got cut. We expected a little more from our carrier and we didn’t really get that.”
Despite any low blows from competitors or the small number of customers who felt less confident about HostMySite cheap hosting after the outage, Honick says he feels he made the right choice with being unabashedly open about the situation.
“Being evasive or even trying to privately communicate to your customers, especially in a time of crisis, is not the most efficient way to get the information out there and yeah I really think we did the right thing,” says Honick. “You know, I’m still dealing with talking to customers and every once in a while I have to reach out and I’m not afraid to do that. I’m not afraid to put my personal contact info out there. There are a lot of owners or CEOs of hosting companies that aren’t really in direct contact with their customers and I think that if you don’t take care of your customers, that’s something you have to be afraid of, but I’m so confident that we do a good job with our customers that when things go wrong, I don’t mind putting it out there. It’s not really as overwhelming as people think it might be. And the customer response alone tells me that was worth it and that was the way to do it.”