On 28 April, CRN's sister publication iTnews reported technicians at Melbourne IT-owned WebCentral were working to resolve an error that saw its customers without access to POP e-mail, webmail or managed Exchange services since 9:30am.
The outage has had a serious impact on WebCentral resellers, who said the down time, not only frustrated customers, but caused them to lose between $10,000 - $20,000 over the weekend.
Craig Waddington, manager of Burleigh Technical Spaces, told CRN, it was in the middle of moving its current customers from WebCentral to its own dedicated servers, when the outage occurred.
"We were into the last few days of moving customers across to a standalone server," said Waddington.
"During a downtime, it's crucial to be able to duplicate services to keep uptime."
Waddington said he had to use his night-shift help desk staff during the weekend to get all his clients moved onto internal servers.
He said the whole thing cost him $10,000-$20,000 over the weekend.
"We have clients who work in real time, having no emails come through has meant money loss for them as well," said Waddington.
"One of our clients is a law firm in Coolangatta.
"It has around three or four hundred users and when email went down for nearly 48 hours, it cost them money.
"My client told me it cost them $20,000-$30,000 of lost business. We almost lost them as a customer and several other customers."
Waddington said similar downtime has happened in the past at WebCentral.
"The lack of communication and voice messages to a special reseller help line has been one of the most frustrating aspects of the situation," he said.
"Explaining this to customers makes no difference, they just want things to be up and running.
"We've decided to use our own upstream. We are spread between Sydney and Brisbane and have had no downtime in the past 14 months."
Waddington believed managed services is the way to go with hosting, but resellers must have disaster recovery guaranteed within an SLA.
Garry Briant, owner of Garmicom Computer Services, said as of 30 April, clients were still not getting email.
He said he not only lost out on earning an income by going out and providing onsite support and service to customers, but one of his major clients has lost out on a Government contract because they couldn't access the email contract.
"[I have] had to sit around talking to customers and pacifying them, when I should be out working," said Briant.
"It's not acceptable. This isn't the first time [WebCentral] has had problems, but I am disgusted with the inexperience in the handling of the whole situation."
From a personal perspective, Briant said three days of being in the office and not out has cost him around $10,000 - $15000.
"As a customer as well as a reseller, I'm not receiving any emails either," he said.
"There'll not only be messages from clients, but also emails from suppliers about orders.
"I don't know what to do. I always thought Melbourne IT (which owns WebCentral) was a big company, so it would be pretty safe with them."
Briant said all of his clients don't mind paying for service but it's got to work.
Previously, Briant said he was with MD WebHosting and had never had this type of trouble with it.
"I like the idea of managed hosting, but if it's this unreliable and affects everything, then I have to think twice about it," he said.
"It's not only the Web hosting part of my business that has been affected but also the ongoing support I provide to clients, including l hardware, network and maintenance.
"These are also long term clients who I worked with for around 12 years. I would have a lot to lose [if they decided] to go somewhere else."
Briant said the level of service has been pathetic and the lack of information to resellers has been non-existent.
"We supply answers to our clients," he said.
"We can't supply them information if WebCentral don't give us the answers."
As of 30 April, a Melbourne IT spokesperson told iTnews the volume of calls was so high that the phone system wasn't able to handle them.
The company said: "Four message stores were 'operational and available', one had 'completed recovery mode', and four had 'completed initial data integrity check' and is 'in recovery mode'.
"A final message store is being restored from back-up after it failed a data integrity check," the company said.
Additional reporting by Brett Winterford, iTnews.
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