RE: [cobalt-users] Looking for Near 100% Up Time for a Very Vocal Hosting Customer

["Jerry Farquhar" <jerry@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Don't be sorry... kind of like you we came into doing Web/Email hosting by
accident.  We had a customer who purchased a Cobalt Qube2 from us back when
we were still big enough fish for a company like Cobalt to want to have
resell their products unlike Sun and only wanting the bigger players.

Any way they didn't like the Qube for some reason so we took it back and put
it into service for ourselves and ended up shortly there after purchasing a
Raq3i and providing hosting to only our contract customers for fee ($125 per
month).  It quickly paid for itself.

As smarter ideas came to mind we opt'd to forgo the monthly hosting fee's
and instead off free hosting with a annual maintained contract on their
computers and networks.  It hasn't been a bad ride and considering all of
the added features that we've offer on the Raq's (WebmMail, Anti-Virus
Protection, Spam Protection/Prevention) it tends to make it very difficult
for any of them to even consider taking their business elswhere.

We even have a Law firm that we had been doing casual hourly support for
that  bailed on a National ISP simply because of what we could provide as
first line of defense against Virus & Spam.

FYI - They had previously been hit so bad by email based virus's that it
took us nearly a week solid to get them 100% virus free.

Kind of makes a person ponder where the money and value is...

Maybe the Rags are accurate that security consulting is where the $$ is..

All things considered.. it always better staying on the outside as a
consultant/consulting firm.

Jerry

-----Original Message-----
From: cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of alan@
Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2002 5:32 PM
To: cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [cobalt-users] Looking for Near 100% Up Time for a Very
Vocal Hosting Customer


> I think what your customer needs is some education. Not even god himself
> needs 100% uptime. They need a consultant who will explain what their
> options are after assessing their needs not someone who will take
> advantage of their naivety and just go along with the stupidity by
> helping them realize ridiculously overprices solutions.
>
>
> I hear you and even the client is pondering the cost getting up into the
> multi-thousands of $$ they even trough a very off the wall number of $50
> K
>
> Here is the really silly side to all of this.. they previously had their
> own in house Lotus Notes server close to 4 years ago now and at least
> once per week they had to call a Notes consultant out on site to resolve
> problems. I'll bet between software and consultant support when they had
> the Notes server they were paying out in the area of $30-40K just to
> keep it up and running and not very well at that especially when you
> consider the consultant they hired typically didn't respond to pages or
> emergencies in less than 24-48 hours even by phone.
>
> Here is the even bigger kicker..  We have been hosting them free of
> charge ( something we offer to contract eminence customers only) and
> only had two outages over the last 3+ years neither of which was more
> than 24 hours. So all in all if they decide to actually change their
> arrangement they are going to go from a $0 cost to likely a $10K minimum
> per year cost.
>
> Say here is one thought that comes to mind.. at one point there was a
> vendor offering a product that connected to Raq3's physically together
> and offered immediate fail over.  Do you recall anything about who it
> was and if it might also work with a Raq550 or XTR ?
>
> Just a thought..
>
> Thanks for the feed back!!
>
> Jerry
>
>> Vocal Hosting Customer
>
>
> "Jerry Farquhar"  wrote:
> > they want to find out the expense and requirements to ensure 100%
> > guarantee of service 100% of the time.
>
> You can make any guarantee you'd like, but you'll need luck on your side
> to deliver.  <g>  Even 99.99% uptime is a measly 52 minutes of downtime
> per year.
>
> > Personally I think they are ridiculous and it is going to cost them a
> > lot more than they bargained for.
>
> For high availability you'll need multiple physical servers, RAID,
> connections through multiple providers, etc. and you'll need mechanisms
> and processes in place.  It'll be so expensive that it's not even worth
> discussing further unless they have a serious budget.
>
> > Any way I looking for feed back from anyone
> > with suggestions as to what is:
> >
> > a.) The most practical approach
> > b.) The most cost effective approach
> > c.) The easiest to manage
> >
> >
> > Here is what they are wanting:
> > ==============================
> >
> > Scenario 1:
> > -----------
> > Primary web & email fails
> > (it could be a result of either hardware or software problem)
> >
> > Desire is to have a second server pick up immediately without any
> disruption
> > or loss of web site content or email functionality and that employees
> > and visitors would be oblivious to any failure at any time.
>
> If the web content is static it's not that difficult as long as you sync
> the primary and secondary physical servers whenever changes are made to
> the primary and have a router or some other hardware that can reroute
> traffic to the secondary server if necessary.  If the site is dyamic or
> is database-driven it'll be more difficult.  If that's the case let us
> know and I'll comment.  As far as realistic low-cost solutions to email
> related problems go, you can setup additional mail servers which are
> lower priority and handle incoming email if the primary mail server
> can't be reached.  If there's a temporary failure the email will be
> queued and delivered to the primary mail server when it's reachable.  If
> it's a long term failure you'd need a mechanism/process to give the
> clients access to the email.
>
> > Scenario 2:
> > -----------
> > Same as Scenario 1 but also includes no disruption even in the even of
>
> > a
> ISP
> > or Internet provider outage.
> >
> > FYI - This part seems simple enough to accomplish by having a backup
> server
> > hosted at a different location on a different ISP's backbone.  The
> > overall problem I see is synchronizing the servers web content and
> > email so that there would be ZERO disruption or user required changes.
>
> It's not as simple as you think.  You would need a mechanism for
> immediately and automatically recognizing the problem *and* you'd need a
> solution to handle DNS caching to prevent the clients from accessing the
> the machine on the IP that is unavailable.  It's tricker if you have to
> guarantee that all users (not just the clients) can access the site.
> It's actually easier if you have multiple machines at the same data
> center, each connected through a different provider, behind a router and
> other hardware/software that can route traffic appropriately.
>
> > I'm all ears as to ideas and suggestions..
>
> Feel free to provide more details, but if you have to guarantee very
> close to 100% availability per scenarios 1 or 2 you'll be looking at
> thousands of dollars for the equipment (nevermind consulting).  You may
> be better off cutting the client lose or outsourcing to a vendor who
> specializes in high availability hosting.  Perhaps you can coax the
> customer into agreeing to a reasonable lower cost solution that
> addresses their primary concerns (whatever those might be).
>
> --
> Steve Werby
> President, Befriend Internet Services LLC
>

Personally, if the customer has swallowed your recent record of uptime, then
I would explain in simple terms that to guarantee a better record will cost
$40k and then offer a SLA that offers 99.99% uptime.

You don't need any new equipment, and the outages will cost a fraction of
your new income.

I'm fed up with trying to help ignorant customers, if they want to pay more
for a better service then let them !

I've tried and the more expensive operators always win. I came into this
business as a user who learned and the thing I've learned is that the old
days where there was an understanding of the subject are gone. The
communities that exist are not recognised or appreciated by the 'new' users.
So they deserve everything that they get.

Look at society today, everything is always the other persons fault, so let
it be and charge them accordingly.

Sorry, fed up with "users"

Alan


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