Logging in allows enhanced commenting features (such as external linking) in news, features, blogs and more.

"And in both cases, the complaints seem to have a lot to do with the confusion surrounding the problems."

That and WebHostingTalk's ridiculous posters who sensationalize every little thing and are out to attack other hosts as often as possible.

Tom,

Your point is well taken. I know how rare it is that somebody rushes to a message board to emphatically delare that they're satisfied. And obviously I have my doubts about whether posting negative comments about a host on a messageboard accomplishes anything for a customer. But I think it's pretty tough to "sensationalize" a violent robbery or a week-long service outage. These are things that inherently get people's attention.

Liam,

You've hit the nail on the head and identified what angered me most about this situation. Navisite kept spinning and spinning -- to its customers and the press -- and never apologized or accepted responsibility.

The contrast between Navisite and Rackspace is even more evident today. Rackspace continues to offer updates on an outage that is by now long-resolved. CEO Lanham Napier has vowed to keep up the explanations (and apologies and promises to implement future safeguards) until all customers are satisified. He writes at http://www.rackspace.com/information/announcements/datacenter.php

"We will not stop until every one of our customers is satisfied with our answers and understands exactly what occurred, how our affected customers will be compensated, and what exactly we plan on doing to ensure that a similar incident will not reoccur."

Navisite? The company no longer even has any kind of message on its home page about the disastrous outage and I know people are STILL having problems and some people still want to know what Navisite will do for them.

It's a tale of two different hosting companies with two different sets of priorities. Rackspace cares about its customers and Navisite cares about protecting its behind.

Honestly, I think you will find that at least In NaviSite's case that most of their clients turned to WebHostingTalk because there was ZERO communication between NaviSite and their clients. Yes NaviSite provided conference bridges initially for their clients to communicate with them, however they quickly pulled their customer representatives off the call, and for a whole week would not communicate with their clients, other than the occasional email saying "they were working on it". NaviSite was obviously out of its league and did not have qualified technicians who knew the Alabanza infrastructure.

In NaviSite's case they attempted the migration on seven (7) occassions, only to be postponed each time. NaviSite were warned by both Alabanza Staff and it's clients, that they could not pull the migration off, however NaviSite had a lease which was about to expire on its Baltimore Datacenter, and therefore went ahead with the migration even though, they were technically NOT qualified to do it.

The result as we know was a seven (7) day outage, where many of Alabanza's clients lost their livelyhoods, and still to this day are experiencing outages due to the reliablity of the SUN VMWARE virtualisation platform that NaviSite forced on its clients. Since then there continues to be a mass exodus of former Alabanza clients moving to other providers and NaviSite could well lose their entire customer client base due to this entire fiasco.

Honestly I understand the need for "spin' but NaviSIte are damn right lying through their teeth!

Navisite is not going to lose their customer base..who are you kidding?? The only customers affected were the Alabanza customers and most of these were RESELLERS who sold $6.95 per month hosting plans with a very limited SLA. Anyone who depends on a website for their income should have the brains not to rely on this type of service for their livelyhood. Besides that many did not have backups of their own data which is also foolish. These providers SLA's, if they even offer a refund for something that is out of their control such as this outage, refund a portion of the $6.95 per month prorated or something similar. I have a hard time even seeing ANY lawsuits come out of this except maybe the resellers themselves depending on their SLA with Navisite- which I am sure has provisions for this type of situation.
I understand that these people are upset but if something is that important to you and you take the cheap way out then you need to live with the consequences. No one ever thinks they will need to use their disaster recovery plan and hopefully they don't, but this is EXACTLY the type of situation having a solid disaster recovery plan is intended for and would have mitigated losses for these individual customers.
Alot of these people posting comments esp Cynthia Brumfield need to get a life and a real job. She seems to have nothing better to do than spout vitriol criticizing Navisite and making false, statements as if they were truths like she knows what is going on first hand. SHE IS A CLIENT OF A CLIENT. She is pissed because her $12 per month email plan had an outage. boo hoo. I am tired of seeing her ranting and commenting to the news media as if it were fact. And if I were Navisite I would be getting an attorney to look at suing her for LIBEL. For all the false claims she has been making as if it were facts. All the major news outlets were quoting her..as if she is knowledgable about this and is able to offer facts and not opinion.
Did you know that she reviews postings to her blogs and posts them "at her convenience" ? Hmmm maybe so she can pick and choose the points of views and turn a FART into a THUNDERBOLT??
Now I am not saying in any way that this migration could not have been handled better. But in the grand scheme of things I don't think its as big a deal as these mesage board posters are making it.

Kazoo,

At least I sign my real name to posts.

As far as being knowledgeable about all this, I would have loved to talk to Navisite directly and get the facts. Let's see -- they disconnected their media contact phone number (I tried several days in a row), didn't return multiple phone calls or emails, and when I finally got through to someone at the company, he hung on me!

I pay my reseller over $200 per month for ecommerce-enabled sites, not $12 per month as you suggest. Still peanuts, I know, but important to me nonetheless. If Navisite doesn't want to be in the business of serving small clients, it shouldn't have purchased Alabanza.

Alabanza, btw, promoted its expertise in redundancy and gave customers comfort that backups would be available in the event of a crisis. Navisite moved ahead with the oft-delayed migration without telling anybody, so no one had the ability to go in and grab up-to-date files.

As far as suing me for libel, given Navisite's hideous PR track record, I can see them doing that. You can imagine the field day I would have with that one and I'm not the least bit frightened at the prospect. In this country, opinion is protected by the First Amendment and is almost never successful grounds for a defamation suit. And truth is always the best defense -- Navisite at least would have to spill the beans on this whole episode in order to prove me wrong.

Finally, I've published all comments posted to my blog, good, bad or indifferent. If you have a comment you'd like to post (that doesn't contain racial epithets or foul language), feel free to do so. I'll publish it.

I'm a small reseller of a reseller and had no idea that promised redundancy was cancelled, that inexperienced people would be transferring the data, had no way of knowing who was doing what. I certainly had my customers files backed up, but what was I to do with them? I had paid yearly accounts--was I to transfer all my accounts after one day of outage? Why would I have dreamed the "professionals" would lie and keep us down for a week? My web traffic data files are still missing. I don't feel right about leaving my reseller when it was not his fault. What was he to have done? He didn't know what was up either. I certainly agree that it would have helped a lot to have been told the truth about what was happening. One story I heard was of a truck carrying the server down the highway in a storm WHAT?