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AnchorDesk

C.C. Holland
My Web site came back from the dead! Here's what happened

C.C. Holland
Managing Editor, AnchorDesk
Friday, March 22, 2002
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If I ever thought the power of the press was overrated, boy have I changed my mind.

You may recall that last Friday, I penned a diatribe of sorts about how my Web host, Interland, assassinated my personal Web site. The company simply pulled the plug on me and my site when it couldn't find some relevant account information. I then went through several circles of hell trying to get the site restored--only to be told the whole thing had been completely deleted. Tough luck.

Just hours after the column went live, dozens of readers had posted similar Web site horror stories, some of them involving Interland. You wrote about erroneous billing, arbitrary cutoffs, e-commerce issues, and much more. And judging by your words, you were just as angry as I was.

INTERLAND TOOK NOTICE. By 4 p.m. on Friday, I'd received two voice mails and one e-mail from Barbara Gibson, the company's VP of public relations. Gibson called again first thing on Monday morning (yes, she gets big points for perseverance). When we finally spoke, she was apologetic and very frank. "We did exactly the wrong thing at every turn," she said. "There's no excuse for what happened."

Gibson went on to explain that, indeed, a copy of my site did exist (hurray!) and she'd be happy to facilitate its resurrection. She also told me that it was company policy to keep a backup of the "deprovisioned" (in other words, deleted) sites, and that any of the Interland people I'd spoken with last week should have known that.

Simply put: "The right people didn't have the right information to give to you."

She also gave me a bit of background. While it didn't completely placate me, it did shed some light on things and made it more clear that Interland wasn't acting in a completely callous manner. Turns out that Icom, from which Interland purchased the hosting accounts, had a history of keeping Web sites up and running, even when the payments for them dried up. In other words, there were plenty of sites still being hosted that weren't earning their keep.

In a glitch, Icom had failed to transfer over my account information, and Interland assumed my site was one of the freeloaders. In an effort to clean house and get current, said Gibson, Interland began deprovisioning small batches of sites over a period of several weeks. In the process, my site got flushed.

ACCORDING TO GIBSON, "Overall, the number of flags that went up where people said 'Where's my site?' was less than 2 percent." I was one of those folks.

By 2:30 p.m. Monday, I had my files back, copied safely via my new CD-RW drive and housed with a new Web hosting company, Hostway. Which was great for me. But what about those of you who are still running into Web hosting roadblocks?

Gibson assured me that customer service is a top priority at Interland and that the company is working to improve both response time and problem-solving. In fact, she said, copies of my column were being circulated and would be used as a training tool, to demonstrate what could go wrong and to illustrate where better customer service could have saved the day (and, presumably, kept Interland from being the subject of a critical article on AnchorDesk).

I asker her to prove that commitment by putting together a troubleshooting procedure for people, like me, who'd gone through normal channels and gotten nowhere. She agreed, and by 7 p.m. Monday gave me a new e-mail address--help@interland.com--that would route people directly to Interland's internal escalations team.

Has Interland got it all figured out now? Probably not. But with people like Gibson on the case, they're moving in the right direction. And hopefully, thanks to my experiences--and yours--the company is learning that looking out for the little guy may indeed be the best way to do business.

Care to share any more of your Web-hosting horror stories? If you've been dealing with Interland, have your problems now been resolved? TalkBack to me.

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