Kapow! American web-host POWWEB lets down the team
Web-hosts are Internet Service Providers which specialise in the provision of large amounts of disk space, and large amounts of bandwidth. This is useful for websites which host large amounts of data, and/or attract a large number of hits or downloads. The providers usually achieve this with RAID technology for redundancy, big pipes to the internet and load-balanced servers.
Tech Talk Radio has been using the American company POWWEB for some time. All of the publicly available podcasts, as well as syndication versions of the show and some production audio used behind-the-scenes, were stored and hosted by POWWEB.
imagine our surprise when, one day, POWWEB just deleted everything (or moved it, or marked it “hidden”) and disabled the account. Ouch. Was it something we said?
Apparently the traffic generated by the Tech Talk Radio podcast caused a massive, unprecedented meltdown in the POWWEB server farm. Power supplies tripped out, disk arrays fell over and circuit breakers blew apart. Dramatic stuff.
Tech Talk Radio hadn’t actually exceeded the terms of its contract, and was still well within its pre-paid bandwidth for the month. So rather than open a line of communication to Andrew McColm, TTR’s Executive Producer and POWWEB account holder, the powers-that-be thought it would be more customer-focussed just to disable the account.
Sometimes in this job you can personally recommend products because you use them yourself, they work well and they give you value-for-money service. Unfortunately POWWEB web hosting is not one such product.
Steer clear.
To read more, keep clicking:
Full email dialogue between Andrew and POWWEB.
Andrew’s thoughts on POWWEB, and Customer Service 101.