Silver Lining Department: I woke up this morning (London time) and found my web page and blog down.  The hosting service I’ve used without problems for over 8 years, well, let’s just say they blew it. At about 4:30 EST my traditional website and newish blog are back online, that’s the good news. The bad news is at almost 5:00 EST there are no graphics on my blog. Since my last post depended entirely on the graphics of logo’s I’m prototyping, it is now rendered meaningless. My apologies! 

I won’t be able to restore the graphics until tomorrow; I’m giving my hosting service a chance to fix the problem. If they don’t, I will.  I’m not sure I have the time to go back to all my old posts and add all those graphics back in, which really bums me out.

What is giving me severe customer heartburn at the moment is how amazingly unresponsive the hosting service is — okay, I know they were probably running around like madmen today.  I was willing to forgive them for the problem, but I’m not so willing to forgive a complete lack of communication.  No messages back from support after three emails, nothing after over 12 hours of outage.  No apology, no “here’s what’s happening” messages, nada, zippo.  Out of respect for a very long relationship I’m not going to say who they are in this post, but if things don’t get better I’ll simply move my sites elsewhere and somebody else can collect money from me every month.

What would it have taken to post a Tweet to all customers with a Twitter ID? Innovative lesson to be learned here? Have a quick way to communicate with customers in an emergency.  Hey, maybe there’s a service to provide in this!  Thank you!  All problems are opportunities in disguise!