More information regarding our migration will be online shortly.  Please keep this blog post linked and we’ll continue updating as we move forward.

Navisite simply does not understand the business they are in.  After speaking with Tech Support, I found out that 40-50 servers of former Alabanza clients are down for this “update”.  They are updating the firmware to the blade servers for “better performance”.  I just don’t understand, how a firm with the “expertise” that Navisite supposedly has constantly has server issues, constantly has to update various issues with these servers, and the updates always require the servers to come offline.

There is simply no understanding from within Navisite of the affect of these updates on smaller companies that cannot afford redundant hosting servers for their web sites.  Companies that are reliant upon high quality service and are not receiving it.

I can honestly say that I’m still an unhappy hijacked former Alabanza client.

I am unsure of why such downtimes are taking place.  The network operations center we were transferred to was supposed to be a highly redundant, highly available network so this outage is really very suprising.  In 5 years with Alabanza, I saw one major outage, and that was due to a large underground fire.  This is the second major outage from Navisite for it’s Alabanza clients in less than 60 days.

I hope that Navisite investors and those who use this company will begin asking why these issues are arising, and what will stop them from happening in the future.

 Update – This is an Email we’ve received from our NOC regarding the issues. 

The purpose of this email communication is to notify you that there is currently an issue with your environment that may or may not impact you. A ticket has been opened for this and our engineers are currently investigating the issue. More updates will follow as information becomes available.

If you have any additional questions or concerns, or if you would like to request a formal incident review, please contact the NOC, your Client Manager or the Client Care Center.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this incident may have caused and appreciate your patience.

NOC Monitor

Update: Status of Servers

Our main server is back online, however, numerous servers are still out at Navisite.  The current story out of Navisite is that this issue has to do with a patch associated with the Virtual Servers they are running in their datacenter.  This is absolutely amazing that they’ve reached a point like this with their operation.

 Here is a great article on what Navisite should have done, and unfortunately didn’t do.  I must say that what dissapointed me most about this entire debacle, of course after the hosting issues, was the lack of information and the disinformation that was distributed by the Navisite team during the first 72 hours of the datacenter migration fiasco.

 As a navisite client, I’ve been very dissapointed with how this situation was handled and hope that they will do the right things for their clients.

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Curbstone is a small software company based in Greater Metropolitan Ball Ground, Georgia.  Population 783.  We sell and support software for the IBM Midrange platform AS/400 (aka iSeries, System i).  Our software is used by over 200 companies around the country to process credit card transactions directly through their AS/400s for retail, mail order, telephone order, and e-commerce.  We support the major authorization networks and banks in the US and Canada.  

Our customers include travelocity.com, Campbell Hausfeld, Rand McNally, Conde Nast, NY Life, American Racing Wheels, CorvetteAmerica.com, Adorama.com, BYU, MIT, Columbia U., US Space and Rocket Center – SpaceCamp.com, and many others.  Our dedicated support site Curb911.com, and our primary marketing site for the credit card software, AS400CreditCard.com, have been down for almost one solid week, since last Friday at 10pm.

The impact has been devastating.  Our customer pay for our support services on an annual basis, and we pride ourselves on GREAT service.  The primary means of support is our on-line Issue Tracker based from the Curb911.com site.  As our customers only occasionally have support issues, as each finds the site missing, we are getting frantic phone calls concerned that something has happened to our company.  Our support staff is now handling all support by phone, taking CONSIDERABLY more time than the efficient Issue Tracking System we have used for 5 years.

AtlantaVirtual.com has been a rock of reliability and trustworthy service for those five years, hosting at least 20 sites for us, with a total of maybe four hours of unexpected downtime over the period.  Alabanza and AtlantaVirtual had done a great job of providing excellent service.  Alex Whetsell from AtlantaVirtual.com has been a trusted vendor and respected expert to guide us on our hosting needs.

Our marketing site being down is costing money.  We get almost 100% of our leads from our marketing site, and that has stopped for a week.  No telling what the impression is when customers go to the site and it is not there.  We had achieved a great Google Page Rank over the years and that must be deteriorating now that the site is off line for so long.

Basically, we look like idiots to our customers and prospects.  This will have a grave impact on our bottom line, as we have lost credibility in a market that demands the utmost in reliability, and have lost 1/4 of a month of leads…

We look forward to a class action suit against Navisite, so they can learn to use better judgment next time.  Of course, we will NOT be hosting there ever again, and are preparing to move all of our sites.  Duhhh.

 Here is a list of links to articles on the topic.

• Navisite responds to customer complaints on datacenter fiasco by directing folks to their Lawyers!
• How to destroy a company in one week!
• Infoworld: Navisite says roughly 90% of sites are back online.

Now, there are also numerous discussions among the major web hosting and web design community boards about this issue.

• About 165,000 web sites down due to Navisite fiasco.
• Navasite Datacenter Fiasco at Webhostingtalk.com

Of course, I could go on and on, but I definately wanted to get the news out that this is not a small event, and that there are still some sites that are down and not online today, 7 days later! 

A note from the desk of CEO Arthur Becker

Dear Alabanza Customer,

I want to extend my most sincere appreciation for your patience and forebearance as we resolved the technical issues that disrupted service during the planned data center migration from Baltimore, MD to our SAS70 certified facility in Andover, MA.

I understand that this has affected your business and your customers, and apologize for the inconvenience and disruption. This is not the standard for NaviSite. While we had planned this migration for months, we did not anticipate a number of scenarios that became major issues during the execution of the migration. Despite the fact that we have acquired a number of companies during the past few years and both consolidated data centers and migrated data, we had never encountered the series of problems that we saw earlier this week.

In preparation for this migration, NaviSite made significant investments to refresh and update the underlying server infrastructure for the Alabanza customers in our Andover data center. This new platform is built upon several state-of-the-art technologies including SUN virtualization hardware with VMWare and EMC storage area networks. The environment is designed to dramatically improve scalability and reliability, and provides more elastic computing. In addition, given NaviSite’s commitment to the Green Grid initiative, the new infrastructure is also more environmentally friendly.

During the migration process, NaviSite mobilized an unprecedented number of technical and support personnel to focus on restoring service with a 24×7 coverage, and opened up multiple communication channels, including its web site and inbound telephone centers in the US and in our India office to inform and assure customers.

As our technical experts identify the root cause(s) of the process failure we will design appropriate remediation programs to accommodate the service disruption. We will also host an all hands conference call for our Alabanza customers in the near future so that we can communicate the reasons for this service disruption in greater detail.

Once again, thank you for your forbearance, patience and understanding.

Best Regards,

Arthur Becker
Chief Executive Officer
NaviSite, Inc.

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We continue to make progress with the environment and while you may not have direct visibility into the support staff, there has been and will continue to be an extended client care and technical engineering staff maintained in the data center on a 24×7 basis to resolve migration issues.

A significant number of servers came out of our QA process last night and were handed off to clients for confirmation and we are now down to a final set of tickets which is becoming more of a combination of migration issues and production run-time support.

We truly appreciate your patience throughout the migration. We recognize your pain points and all of us have been working to fix these issues as our only priority.

We truly appreciate your patience throughout the migration. We recognize your pain points and all of us have been working to fix these issues as our only priority.

While we have received complaints, we have also received compliments on our efforts.  We received some feedback that the new environment is working better than the previous one. Moving to a faster and better platform was the rationale for the data center migration, and we already are beginning to hear some positive news.

Our engineers are working throughout the night to bring all sites back up as soon as possible.