While I’m very happy to be working with these new clients, as I talked with them, as well as their old provider, who was a reseller of the email service, I realized the amount of stress that the outage caused, and how many people it effected.  Email is business critical.  Ask yourself how you would you feel if your email stopped working for even a day.

I’ve been in the hosting business for almost 12 years, and it reminded me of when I first started New Media One, back in 1997.  I started reselling the hosting mostly because back then, there weren’t a lot of hosting providers that had everyting you needed to host a true ecommerce site.  I was happy with their hosting, but they were having some email issues.  The issues were that once a month or so, their email server would get overloaded, and the email would be delayed in arriving.  They dropped the email service as part of what was covered in their 99.9% up-time guarantee, which made me nervous, but when it happened more than once, the few clients I had would call me.  As a reseller, all I could a say was “We know about the email issue, and we are working on it.”  Those few clients were fairly understanding, partly because 12 years ago, we didn’t ALL depend on email… but I learned a VERY valuable lesson.   What I learned was that even though the few clients I had at the time felt ok when I told them “We were working on the email issue”, I felt bad, and stressed, and unable to solve the issue for my clients.  I realized that I, the person these companies trusted, didn’t REALLY know what the cause of the email issue was, and that I PERSONALLY was NOT “working on it”.   It almost felt dishonest, even though it really wasn’t, as I knew several highly skill and highly paid people were working on the email issue in a data center in a far off state.  But, I had no direct access to those people, those people didn’t get the call from my clients, and I didn’t really know that cause.

What I learned was that I could NOT do business that way.  When someone trusts me to provide their business communications, I need to know down to the last detail what the issue is, how to fix it, how long it will take to fix, and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

The pressure that came with those 5 or 6 hosting clients trusting me with their business all those years ago, has grown to nearly 200 clients.  Many of those clients are taking credit card payments directly, so there is not just an assumed cost to any downtime, there is a direct, dollars to lost sales correlation.

When I talked with the reseller I mentioned above, and herd the stress in his voice, and then talked with his clients, I could really relate to both of them.  The “Cost of choosing the wrong email or web site hosting provider” in this case was paid by the reseller, the clients, and their customers.

The cost in stress was a lot higher than the cost in dollars.