The news feeds I create are hosted hosted by the Digital Production BuZZ. This website is hosted on Media Temple’s Gridserver, which we chose because it allows us to absorb large amounts of traffic by simply using more resources on the Gridserver (for which we pay of course).
Unfortunately, Media Temple had a major problem with the Gridserver this morning and despite multiple phone calls to tech support and their media relations people did not get returned. Finally just now, I reached Marketing Director Alex Copehart, who could comment on the record. He had a team of people with him for the call (I suspect they were already together working on understanding this morning’s problems) and I was able to ask why there wasn’t more information on the website and why I hadn’t had my calls returned.
Here’s a tip, if you get to an outside call center for an organization like this, try hitting the directory number for sales! Most companies are more responsive in sales than anywhere else. It was via sales that I was able to get a useful comment.
The problem with the lack of detailed and timely information, Alex explained, was because t they were still attempting to understand fully what went wrong and they did not want to post misleading information.
David also offered, unprompted, to find us a different solution that would be more robust as a discounted price and we’ll explore that further with him over the next few days.
In any technology “stuff happens”. The Grid Server is a new concept and one that has potential, and we’re treating this as a one-off glitch. We may get hooked up with a different solution with them or
we’ll find a more reliable hosting service. We hope that today’s problems are transient. We’ll see.
My take-away, is for businesses that are having a problem, is to be as open and honest as you can be as quickly as you can be. My biggest frustration today is that I had no idea whether this was a problem that would be fixed in an hour, in which case we’d just wait it out, or whether it was a really big problem and I’d better make other arrangements to keep our site and feed alive. We’ll certainly be exploring failover provisions for the future.