I mentioned recently that I would come back to why last week I had such hassle – Here is a copy of the letter I wrote to the Managing Director of my ISP, re: my nightmare, week-commencing 10th April for 5 consecutive days. NB The name of the ISP is not listed and I believe when you work through the detail you will understand why I am motivated to finish one of my books on how organisations have forgotten about the customer!

I decided approx 6-8 weeks ago to move from a shared service to a managed business server.

However, this is what happened on Tuesday 11th April.

1. All of my MySQL configurations had been cleared out!?
2. The result – NO databases!
3. Disruption to my business
4. Stress galore.

My issues

1. No information about why this happened
2. Very poor change control on “isp’s name!”’s basis
3. No warning or communication about what was happening
4. Poor response from support
5. After 3 days I managed to get back my databases by exporting from SQL5 to SQL4 4. Amazingly, you don’t offer MySQL 5 on a dedicated box – again no one told me to prepare for this.
6. On the 3rd day all the server settings were turned off!!!?
7. The latter resulted in NO information on what settings I needed to enter to get all my services restarted.

My expectations

I need compensation for all the hassle, your lack of change control procedures (I’m happy to write some for you – I’m not being funny here just helpful), my loss of some data and disruption to my company business.

I love “isp’s name!”’s competitiveness but fail to understand how change control was missed on this occasion.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Categories: Customer Services