Website woes

Last week was a bit of a nightmare. The main BIW corporate website, www.biwtech.com, suddenly became unavailable due to a server problem at the hosting company used by our website designer (important note: the production servers delivering BIW’s collaboration applications are, of course, totally separate – with a different company, Attenda – and have remained online throughout).

The hosting company – Webfusion – denied it was their fault and, totally unimpressed by their obstructive and unhelpful attitude, we eventually insisted that our web designer move the site to a new hosting company – a process finally completed on Friday. There are still a few glitches, but at least it’s back up again.

I am not the only person who’s been frustrated by Webfusion, it seems. A quick surf around some of the webhosting review sites and discussion forums soon revealed a deep undercurrent of dissatisfaction. See what I mean at Tech-forums.net, webhostingjury.com, ciao.co.uk, net4nowtforum.co.uk and reviewcentre.com, for example. It’s easy to be lulled into a false sense of security by the glossy marketing promises of a hosting provider’s own website, but – as I now know – it’s also worth looking at what their customers say about them.

A website outage is obviously a problem, especially if the business is concerned with Software-as-a-Service. I made this point last year when 4Projects ‘ website went down briefly, adding (a few days later, in the context of an outage at Salesforce.com), that I might be tempting fate by talking about it. While on the subject, I did try to look at fellow collaboration provider ePin’s website over the weekend and again this morning….

Update (2100hrs GMT, 29 October): ePin’s website is back live again.

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