The co-location company that hosts a community server with which I’m involved went bust – at 11am yesterday. Without telling anyone, including their own tech support and hosting facility.
I suppose we could have predicted this. We’ve been trying to pay them for for a few months now, with very little success. Hard fast rule of e-commerce: if you make it impossible for people to pay you, and yet you are expecting to be paid, something bad will happen.
We can tell the precise point at which the co-loc company ceased to co or loc, because at that moment our machine vanished off the Net. A lot of heavyweight sysadmin types run their mail from this box, so turning off the packets is a bit like throwing up the BOFH-Signal into the sky. Heads turn.
First step when a hosting company spontaneously bankrupts: get your box out of there before the creditors mistakenly melt it down for slag. A fantastic friend who runs her company from the box ran cross-town to airlift it out. Serendipitously she bumped into a guy who is running a hosting outfit in the racks upstairs. He’s an ex-employee of our co-loc, and realising what is going on, kindly takes us (and I’m guessing several other bedraggled servers) on board and plugs us into his network.
He’s given us a few days leeway to sort ourselves out, but – always assuming this all hasn’t been part of his evil masterplan – I think we’ll go with him. He’s still at that phase where he knows all his customers and answers the phone himself. I still have problems explaining to people why little ISPs like this seem to work better than big ones. I guess, if I wasn’t so dog-tired, I’d say that the economies and diseconomies of Internet services are shaped like a big mexican hat. You can scale up pretty quickly, and then it all goes to shit until, if you’re lucky, you sell out to someone big enough to run matters properly again. You can either be Henry Ford or William Morris, but you can’t be Mr In-Between.