Melbourne IT struggles with migration of customers - websites offline -

[elbranch]

Australian websites offline as Melbourne IT struggles with migration of 350,000 customers

http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/bus...tion-of-350000-customers-20150116-12rtaw.html

Angry customers of Australian web hosting company Melbourne IT are threatening to leave the company after a "migration" left their websites and email offline, in some cases for up to a week.

In an attempt to deal with the matter, managerial staff at the company, which is one of Australia's largest web hosting firms, have been "manning the phones" as ongoing issues around customer account migration, and a separate email delay issue, continue to overwhelm their customer support lines after weeks of problems.
...

"This company is destroying my business," wrote Steven Groves. "We have had no email for almost a week, our website has been down for a similar amount of time. I have now spent in excess of 10 hours on hold as they keep dropping the calls and cutting me off."
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Mr Mercer said "stability issues" with Melbourne IT's email service arose in December and were continuing to cause intermittent delays in customers' email services.
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He said the email problem should be temporary and was "optimistic" on Friday afternoon that a solution had been found.
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The migration of customer accounts applied only to Melbourne IT brand customers, Mr Mercer said while emphasising that a "very small proportion" of customers being migrated were having issues.

 

[Rhythm]

I keep getting 503 errors trying to log in for the past month.

Absolutely horrendous.

 

[ttfan]

It's an absolute joke, and they're among the most expensive too!
I hope their customers will finally see this after this fiasco, and look around for a better one (not hard!).

 

[findtim]

i do not want to sound like i have this all sorted but backup is the go, i fail sometimes also, one thing i do have and HAD TO DO recently is re-delegate a site to a new DNS.

i have @ 4 different servers so with my backups if something goes pear shaped i can upload the site to another server and re-delegate the domain which may bring the site back up in @ 1 hour or less.
its worth having hosting accounts with different companies, not keeping all you eggs in one basket !
its time consuming to move 100 sites but you can at least keep the KEY ones going quickly instead of spending 10 hours on the phone......... which i have experienced as well !!!!!!!!!!!!
what everyone needs is a "fire plan" , "exit plan" , start to research NOW the "what ifs"
i had to "evacuate" a site for a new client just recently, QUICKLY ! , so i just went and got a HGator account, $1 first month and got it out of where it was at, now i have had 30 days to sort it out for them, basically took me a few hours and their down time was minimal.
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once again, i stuff up as well, but this is what i have learnt so far, hosting companies are a big threat, the bigger threat is the domain registrar that handles your DNS !!!

tim