08.09.2007

We have moved

After month of intermittent problems, crashes and more recently two weeks of serious outages and slow operation we have moved to a new hosting company in Basel, Switzerland.

The new host is a smaller more dynamic company that we have been watching for some months, but only recently felt able to handle web sites as large as ours.You should notice faster speeds and far less down time.

The story of our hosting is an interesting one with some relevance to other industries.

We previously moved Vertikal.Net in 2004 as we started to grow rapidly, and moved to what at the times was a young dynamic company offering a far better product that the older established companies, with excellent service and a good attitude.

Internet years are a bit like dog years and within two years the fantastic company began to suffer from problems associated with its rapid expansion. Service slipped, the product became ‘old hat’.

The owners promised upgrades and improvements, they never came and finally after persevering for over six months, things went from bad to worse.

Not only did they experience major problems, including the destruction of part of our database, but the way they dealt with the problems was impossible.

So with our focus clearly on our customers we felt we had no choice but to move, even though the contract we have paid for has a further five months to run and that the cost of moving such a beast as Vertikal.Net is not cheap or easy.

The new host, having observed the problems experienced with the bright young businesses of five years ago, seems determined to avoid falling into the same trap and is taking a wholly different view to the rate of expansion.

Hopefully we have found a home that will grow hand in had with us over the coming years?