As of writing this on my word processor, which will be posted once the site is up, the host that I have been using for years appears to be suffering some network outage. I have been with them for over two decades where service response has often been lightning fast with reliable uptime. It seems today the whole network is down and literally every site that is hosted through them is down. Since even its own site is down customers like myself have been scrambling to find alternative ways to see what is wrong.
Eventually I find one of their social media sites, specifically Facebook, where they did post a notice that there is an outage with no ETA on when it will be back to normal. It has been several hours too and you can imagine how much potential revenue companies are losing as a result of this downtime. To make it worst, some people resell its hosting services for their own clients where if they aren’t getting answers then they won’t know what to tell everyone as well.
The biggest complaint appears to be communication as the company isn’t providing frequent updates with specific information as to what is going on. That is where it kind of gets interesting as there seems to be two sides of the fence. Since this is a small business you can imagine a lot of its clientele have been with them for years or even decades. Since this is the first time anyone has seen this kind of downtime some are understanding.
However, many people who have been with them for decades have publicly expressed that they are leaving to different companies as the communication and downtime is simply too risky for their business. Just think about that. Being a customer with a company for over 20 years and this one major incident is enough to lose them forever.
It shows the importance of always having to provide excellent and consistent service. Or especially in this case methods to quickly and efficiently communicate with people on what is going on. Because it really only does tale one incident to completely overshadow one’s overall history.