Keeping Customers After a Disaster
Recently The Planet, a large web hosting company that has numerous data centers, experienced an explosion in their H1 DC. At one point over 9,000 servers were offline. It’s been fun to watch the commotion. I am very happy that I am no longer in the hosting business (with the exception on one non-profit site) since the two dedicated servers I had at one point were located in this DC. No, I never used The Planet, but The Planet bought out ev1Servers.net which used to be rackshack.net.
Anyway, Douglas Erwin, CEO of the Planet, recently announced the compensation for customers affected by the outage. It ended up being two months free service and 10% on new services for the rest of the year. Most customers were expecting one month free, so the second was a surprise. There was a twist though, the second month of free service will be in December. Why would they do that? Why not get it out of the way right now? While some folks were speculating it was to keep their cashflow up in the short term, I don’t think that was the answer. They did it to keep customers from jumping ship! Folks who were looking to leave will stick around to get their free month in December! If The Planet can keep a customer until December, they probably aren’t going to leave. Smart, if you ask me.
If you are still in the hosting business, this should serve as a reminder for the need of local backups, offsite DNS, load balanced servers in different geographical areas, your customers contact data, and lots of caffeine!
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