Are you bringing the Es then?

Everybody happy? Well apart from Tom minus his podcasts and Michele with a black mark (rightly or wrongly) in the blogosphere.

It’s no better nor worse than what I’d expect from any hosting provider.

You are telling me that if your site disappeared and when you contacted the hosting company their response was dismissive and blaming you, you would find that satisfactory?

Then your expectations of service are obviously extremely low.

Personally if I am your customer and their is a service issue, I don’t want to hear who’s fault it is, I want to hear when it will be resolved.

Tom’s Tyrants or Michele’s Mashers.

Then, in the great tradition of travellers weddings those who attend can choose from a fish hook, planks with nails in them, bicycle chains and knuckle dusters.

Once the awards are all given out there is to be a fight to the death. The team that kills all of the other team first wins.

Damien told me.

It’s no better nor worse than what I’d expect from any hosting provider. Only difference is that Michele is a lot more accessible than your average hosting company.

I would tend to use a free service (such as siteuptime.com) to monitor the site in general. There are (paid for) services to more detailed alerts on specific areas of the site.(e.g. if downloads are failing). If the item is that valuable , you can pay people to do a part time sys admin (for your blog / application , not the server itself).

I don’t think any of the above services are ’standard’ with any web hosting (the ones that do offer them make a big noise about it), so I wouldn’t have presumed that Blacknight or anybody else would have offered them by default.

Paul

If you have your files backed up and a move to a dedicated podcast service completed (which should have been done a while back given the size of your audience), then what’s the issue?

The issue is the server went down weeks ago and I was unaware of it due to unfortunate family circumstances.

There was no effort made by Blacknight to contact me to make me aware of the issue.

When I did contact Blacknight to try to find out why my podcasts were no longer downloading, the response I received from Blacknight was appalling.

This is a customer service issue, not a technical one. That’s why I titled my blog post Blacknight Customer Service gets worse.

If you have your files backed up and a move to a dedicated podcast service completed (which should have been done a while back given the size of your audience), then what’s the issue?

Yes it’s annoying to ‘have’ to move hosting, but a lot of people would like to have the ‘too much traffic’ problem!

I know the experience. Nothing gives me more comfort than knowing I’ve paid for three nines of reliability and will never be stopcocked for serving gigs of throughput. Both of those facilities cost more than my podcasts pay.

Lessons learned all around.

By the way, there’ll be no violence at the awards (from me anyway!). I don’t agree with violence (and in any case Michele is bigger than me).

I’m a LOT bigger than Tom

Michele