Unhappy with downtime? Here is why you should still think twice before switching to another web host
Data Center Knowledge has posted an interesting article about customer poaching in the web hosting industry, especially in combination with downtime incidents, sometimes referred to as “rescue marketing”.
What happens is that when a hosting provider suffers from downtime (which will understandably result in lots of frustrated customers), competing companies will swoop in and try to take advantage of this. In the past this was often accomplished with text ads in search engines, but these days Twitter is becoming an increasingly common way to target customers.
Above: A hosting customer being targeted in the wake of a datacenter incident (view tweet).
The thing here is that no hosting provider or service is completely immune to downtime. Generally speaking, the chances are that the hosting company you’d be moving to if you accepted one of these offers could be even less reliable than the one you’re abandoning.
Our take on this is that since every hosting provider will have downtime at some point in time, the really important thing is how they act when they do have a problem.
- Will they be open about it?
- Will they learn from it and take measures to prevent it from happening again?
- How will they treat their customers?
If your hosting provider has been reliable in the past and the answers to the above questions are positive, you as a hosting customer should at least consider giving them another chance before running for the hills and an uncertain future with a different hosting provider.
We’re all for healthy competition, just make sure that switching to another hosting company isn’t reduced to a knee-jerk reaction on your end. Always do your research before making such an important change to your site.
The headline to this article has to be the longest in the history of this blog. 
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The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.
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Jean-Luc
July 10th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Amen to that!
Russ Garrett
July 10th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
It’s definitely worth reading this blog article by ServInt – one of Rackspace’s competitors – defending Rackspace and telling Rackspace’s customers not to leave because of the downtime:
http://blog.servint.net/2009/07/08/why-servint-stands-beside-rackspace-and-you-should-too/
It’s one of the most gracious and selfless pieces of corporate propaganda I’ve ever seen
Pingdom
July 13th, 2009 at 6:22 am
@Russ: Agreed. It’s a good read. Propaganda can take many shapes, and this one was classy.
Lynsey Sterrey
May 5th, 2010 at 7:05 am
Totally agree – all hosting providers should be open and honest about the fact that 100% uptime cannot always be gauranteed. Its the nature of the shared hosting beast.