An open letter to WiredTree

Dear Wired Tree Support Staff,

My Hybrid Dedicated server was affected by hardware issues last week.

In these situations I imagine what tends to happen is that the very people that have saved the day get shouted at by their clients. Even when they've just fixed everything in record time under tremendous pressure. It's not fair, and we really, really want to try to be different. 

WiredTree, we'd like to publicly thank you for being so fabulous when faced with disasters.

There was a recurring hardware issue with the node; traced to either the RAID array or one of the disks. This appeared to be fixed after restarting the node on a few occasions.

At this point your technicians started readying a backup hardware node because stability was questionable, although the fault appeared to be caused by faulty  backplane.

You then scheduled emergency maintenance and replaced the CPUs, RAM, Motherboard and case (including the backplane), but keeping the original hard disks to minimise disruption.

Two days later there was a further issue with the RAID array; evidently the problem being something more deeply ingrained within the actual hard disks.

The entire server was then migrated to new hard disks on a new hardware node.

During this entire episode we suffered a few minor outages; but only for brief periods of time, and always whilst in contact with your staff.

The situation has now been completely resolved and I have complete faith again in the stability of the system.

Throughout this incident support tickets were answered within minutes – even the ones at 3am!

I always tell our hosting customers that you can never have enough redundancy to completely prevent disasters, but you can have a completely effective disaster recovery plan in place for when things do go wrong.

Thankfully these things don't happen to often because of high quality and well maintained hardware; but this recent episode is a testament to your disaster recovery plans, your senior technicians, and your support staff.

Nick, Jenn, Stephen, John, Joe, Bradley, and anyone else who worked on this behind the scenes - thank you.

Rob Swan, Director