A responsible hosting company can put in all kinds of redundancy and backup policy and equipment – only to get hit by the Black Swan six sigma event.

I think RackSpace’s response is a credit to a company that is transparent and customer-centric.

Twitter provides another external communication delivery mechanism to clients.

Mike@RackWire.com
http://twitter.com/rackwire

In response to the question posed by the article – the fact that some will kick you even when you are down is inevitable. It has been going on for year and those that use less than ethical marketing tactics might have a few short-term wins, though they won’t be around 5 years from now. We should all work hard to educate our clients to the different costs of risk mitigation (Tier1 colocation is way less expensive than Tier4 colocation), how we will communicate with them in the *very unlikely* event of a problem regardless of how large or small, and we should all support our fellow data center professionals that are faced with the same challenges that we are today.

These challenges are only going to increase in frequency as we become more reliant on data-centers. The e-Health initiatives alone are going to cause a major upsurge in data center activity. If we don’t help each other sort this out now things are going to only get worse.

There’s no excuse for failure, but don’t you think in-fighting and anger will only lower credibility in the long run?

Watching how Rackspace has managed their accountability in the situation and seeing examples such as ServInt’s response has given me a new perspective on business communications. Social networks have sped up the communication loop and we are all subject to failures when it comes to operations, whether it is down time or bad customer services, some things are just out of our control. It’s inspiring to see companies supporting each other and driving each other to better service rather than going in for the kill when things get tough.

After all, isn’t it about the service that the end user gets rather than who provides it? The best rise to the top, and the more ethically they do it the better it is for everyone.

You can’t simultaneously stand up for RS’s and claim you’re customer-centric.

We feel terrible for the many customers who were promised and sold uptime (self-healing networks, world-class data center etc.) only to have power to their servers lost. Our hearts go out to them. We do not feel sorry for RS and we think it’s an arrogant and self-centered to do anything but talk about the appropriate damaging of credibility to the entire industry.

Every vote of confidence for RS in this event is a vote AGAINST the customer and against the industry as a whole. We as an industry have to hold ourselves accountable for uptime or the entire industry will wither.

It’s not just RS customers who suffer when they have an outage. All of us lose too. How? Because the pie (the market) is growing faster than any of us can take clients from each other. That’s the good news. Unlike really competitive industries (airlines, telecom, automobiles) we don’t have to worry too much about trying to eat each others’ slice of the pie when the pie is growing. So, when RS, the “gorilla” in the industry, with by far the largest balance sheet on the planet in this market has multiple power outages, everyone asks “Maybe we should bring our servers back in house. Heck if RS can’t deliver power reliably how can anyone else? Maybe it’s just not a good idea.” The pie stops growing and all we can do is begin to go after each other’s slice of the pie.

When the biggest dedicated provider of managed servers to the world can’t keep the power on the entire industry hurts. We should be irate with RS and their failures, not apologizing for them. I feel sorry for their customers but not for RS.

So are we pissed at RS? Yes. Should they be incredibly trite, apologetic to all us competitors and all our clients as well? Yes. Without customers, there is no RS, no Online Tech and no managed hosting industry.

It is a mystery to me why anyone running a data center would spend the tens or hundreds of millions to build it, and stop short of the tiny cost of a qualified third party review by the people that designed the Tier standards in the first place. If hosting providers want to talk about a more professional competition, shouldn’t this include being transparent with the customers?

At the end of the day, tier power chain (or components thereof) failed. In an industry where we all claim “N+ this” and “Tier that” and “five nines”, you have to expect to be the target of a marketing attack when your “stuff don’t work”.

When we experience customer issues we focus on customers first, communications a very close second. Get the servers up, get the message out. But we also realize that real-time status is becoming more and more expected – so we are delivering that via Twitter, our blog, etc.

We will NEVER respond quickly enough to customer outages. We want to eliminate them. But when they do occur we want to be open, and honest and we want to do so as quickly as possible.

Thanks again,

Rob

Rob La Gesse
Director of Customer Development
Rackspace
210-845-4440