My buddies over at AITCOM did it again. On July 10th, around 5:45 pm EST my server went mia. Being a Friday and occasionally experiencing the minor outages (< 5 minutes), I didn't give it much thought and left it for the night. The outage wasn't as minor as I had thought, the next morning I go to check email and nothing... The server was dead in the water. Calls to AIT pretty much fell on deaf ears. They performed a reboot and called it fixed. Of course they test things really well. After my forever long wait on hold back on the phone with them and once again my outage report falls on deaf ears. They tell me that they went ahead and found no hardware failure, so this must be my fault and I have to pay them to look into it. Their admins much be morons, after a couple of minutes, without any access to their network, I was able to determine that my IP addresses had been re-assigned elsewhere. Would you believe that even after telling them this, they said there is no hardware problem and that I had to pay them to get this issue resolved. WTF?!?!?!
After a few deep breaths, I said fine as long as once they found out that the problem was theirs that I wasn't going to be charged. Day after day, no progress. I spent many hours on the phone ripping their customer service people new ones. I hate dealing with customer service people. Their roll is simply to be cannon fodder for the times serious issues arise. All they can say is that they are sorry, someone is working on it and no one else there can help, so I have to be patient. Between that and their incompetent engineers, I am surprised they are still in business. Finally after 5 days, they come back and tell me things are fixed and I wont be charged because it was due to a hardware failure on their end. It took 5 frickin days to figure out there was a hardware failure somewhere (that only was affecting my server of course) and they even knew where to start looking from? Things didn't sound right to me. At least I was able to get my mail back online along with my blog. The problem is that I still don't have 6 of my IP addresses. I am now on day 7 of this and my server is only limping along. The only saving grace here is that the server isn't running anything critical. Imagine being a business customer and having a complete outage for 5 days and after 7 days you still are only partially online. I think it might be time to look for a new provider :/