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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