Social Media Can Benefit Businesses, Analyst Says
Filed under: Alabanza, BlodgetTech, Company Announcements, Facebook, Non-profits, Social Media, Twitter
This comes from The Morning News - Local News for NW Arkansas.
A few highlights:
Using social media to contact future clients and customers can be effective and used in conjunction with advertising in traditional markets like newspaper, radio and television, Judkins said.
Tammy Thurow of the chamber said she also tweets, but keeps her messages oriented to business items. For example, she used her BlackBerry on Monday to “tweet” to those who follow the chamber on Twitter that the social media seminar was beginning in a few minutes.
She suggested Robinson use Twitter to alert clients or potential clients about homes he just listed for sale and give his phone number to set up showings.
Businesses can’t just use Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to inundate users with spam or advertising, or those users will stop paying attention to the business messages, Judkins said.
Share links to interesting articles with clients in the same field, e-mail coupons to Facebook users and ask Twitter users for feedback, he said.
“Think like a contributor, not a marketer, and don’t promote something on every post,” Judkins said.
Media Reports About Our Recent Server Outage…
Filed under: Alabanza, BlodgetTech, Computer World, Domain Names, Media, Navisite, New Media, Non-profits, The Baltimore Sun, The Register, Web Host Industry News, WebProNews, dslreports
Future Plans Regarding BlodgetTech Hosting Services
Filed under: Alabanza, BlodgetTech, Company Announcements, Company News, Contingency Plans, Liquid Web, Michigan, Navisite, Server Outage
Again we apologize to our customers for the major problems that occurred this last weekend.
As previously stated when we chose Alabanza we felt we were getting the best. We thought that we were getting a company that would provide the best of service, support, and protection for our customers. For the last 2 years that proven to be true, but we learned that choosing the best isn’t enough. We have to have a long term strategy in place that will allow us to be ready to take action to protect our customers businesses in the event anything like this were to happen again. We can no longer afford to have all our eggs in one basket by relying on just one vendor for support. No matter how reliable that vendor may appear to be today, you never know what the future will be.
We have already taken some steps by purchasing two servers on a new network. This network provider, Liquid Web is celebrating their 10th Anniversary this year. We were particularly impressed that Liquid Web was ranked in the upper 20% of the top 5000 of the Fastest Growing Private Companies in America, as ranked by Inc. Magazine. They were also ranked one of the top 50 Companies to Watch by the Governor of Michigan.
This is only one of several upcoming announcements that we will be making in the near future. Stay tuned!
Major Outage Affects Our Network.
Filed under: Alabanza, Andover, Baltimore, Boston, Company Announcements, Company News, Maryland, Massachusetts, Navisite, Server Outage, Technology, Web Hosting Providers
Some of our clients have asked for information regarding the issues that effected our servers that were down for forty-eight hours over the weekend, with additional incremental problems for another twenty-four hours. In this day and age most companies lease their servers off site from known providers. BlodgetTech is no different. The company we chose was Alabanza, a high end server provided that dealt primarily with hosting providers and other resellers. They provided 24 hour monitoring service and a reliable network. The last outage our company experienced of any type prior to this weekend was an outage around a year ago, and was traced to a physical hardware failure which was repaired and brought back online in less then three hours. Overall, Alabanza had reputable support services, and helped our company grow to where it is today.
Two months ago a company named NaviSite bought Alabanza. Like is common in most mergers NaviSite wanted to reduce cost and put their own systems in place. They decided to migrate our servers from the Alabanza’s Baltimore, MD location to NaviSite’s data center located in Andover, MA. From the start the move was plagued with problems. The proposed dates of the move were pushed on multiple occasions. It was certainly inconvenient to have those time frames pushed it was better to push them versus having it go incredibly bad. On November 2nd at 10PM EDT NaviSite began what was to start a series of blunders that has most likely cost them the Alabanza customer base.
Their original plan was to create virtual copies of all client servers on new equipment in Andover. However, by 5am on the morning of November 3rd they had only accomplished getting a fraction of them transfered. They then proceeded to start physically trucking around 400 of the roughly 900 servers to take a 400 mile trip.
By some time late Saturday night by my accounts, servers started to arrive in NaviSite’s Andover location.
At this point I believe a few of the facts are a blur to me. I do know our server was disconnected from Alabanza’s network at around 5:30pm eastern time on Saturday November 3rd and loaded on a truck. Although I can not be 100% sure as to the exact time I believe it arrived in Andover late Sunday night.
One would think this was the end of the problem but amazingly, it was just the beginning. NaviSite immediately started to power up the servers and connect them to the network. When the final pieces were in place NaviSite switched the network from Baltimore to Andover and plugged it in to the new network. The servers came up for about 10 minutes, and then quickly crashed the network. NaviSite blamed the issue on a DOS (denial of service) attack but later discovered it was “ARP” traffic (Best I understand ARP is excessive communication between the computers inside the network to each other). NaviSite discovered that without the Tipping Point system (think: hardware firewall) they had in Baltimore installed the network would never work. So they proceeded to pack up the Tipping Point box in Baltimore and fly it to Andover. By Sunday night they were installing it but it took several hours and a few up and down of the network to get it to work properly.
Our server finally started to come to life at around 6:30 am on Monday November 5. We spent the better part of the morning repairing a few issues on our managed server to get it back online. By mid morning we had 85% of our customers back online. However, due to routing problems inside the NaviSite network many sites started to have intermittent problems. Our server went back down around 4pm as NaviSite shut down the network for further repairs. Not remembering exact times we were back up a few hours later. By Tuesday morning we were running at or near 100%. We did experience some network issues throughout the day but considering the weekend were fairly stable. We have had no official reports of outages today from our clients.
We will have some new announcements to be made in the near future as we look toward the future and past this very unfortunate incident. We thank you for your patience and understanding during this crisis situation.
