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What an Internet Provider should be.

Victoria to Vancouver Server move. DBFT trouble.;

Feb 2nd/3rd outage for Victoria servers.

Yes, for everyone affected, this hurt. For about seven years we were happy co-locating with Pacificcoast.net and Uniserve whom they merged with. As of January 1st Uniserve quit handling the co-location. They had been subleasing space from a company called DBFT, and they decided to quit being the middleman and passed the contracts over to DBFT.

The short story, is that after a little haggling, DBFT sent us a 9am e-mail giving us 4 hours notice of service termination unless we signed a contract we had already objected to. I could understand that sort of behavior, if we had been threatening to "not pay", but their threat appeared to be in response to our trying to re-assure them we would pay for our usage based on their proposed rates, but had no interest in doing that for a 12 month contract.

I (Tom Brown, the owner of BareMetal) expect a reasonable amount of courtesy and respect from my business partners and found DBFT's behavior completely unacceptable. As events evolved, we left them with a cheque for the service we had used at their proposed rates and moved all our equipment out of their facility and over to peer1.net in Vancouver.

I would have knuckled under and did the immoral thing of signing the contract and rewarding someone for their atrocious behavior, except for two things: I still don't fully understand the termination conditions of their contract if we were to cancel it, and their contract allowed them to terminate service without any warning or cause... so we would still have been forced to trust them not to hurt us... which they had already threatened to do.

I feel very bad/sorry for all the clients who were affected. We failed to make our 99.9% uptime guarantee, and the consequent free hosting for February will cost us more the $3,000 . I am not complaining, that guarantee is there to keep us striving for 100% uptime, and we know that our clients would rather pay for the month. I am just explaining that it was not an easy decision to make, and it hurt us too. I feel strongly that terminating all relations with DBFT was the only appropriate action.

As a side effect, our machines in Canada are now located with a bigger (and more professional) network provider, redundant connectivity, a competent NOC, and all at a good price.

I do want to take a second to thank peer1.net for helping us make the transfer so quickly. We faxed them a contract at 4pm, and were finished the install by 7am (which included the take down, the ferry trip, the install, and a lot of reconfiguration for the new IPs).

Once again, please accept my apologies for any inconvenience this transition caused, I know it hurt some clients but I strongly believe it will allow us to provide a better service.

-Tom Brown (Feb 3rd, 2005)



 
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