Monday, April 23, 2012

Broken processes

Today one of our major clients woke up to no email service.

When planning a company merger our client had grabbed and registered a domain name with a hosting company. Some considerable time later we are helping them to rationalise and move to a smaller number of suppliers. Four previous domain name moves went without a hitch, but mostly because they were not being used and no one noticed that the supplier we are moving from has broken processes...

Simply, their internal process releases a domain name and deletes the record immediately. They should disconnect those two steps because their record delete should only take place after the new host has taken ownership. By doing the delete prematurely there is no lookup for the domain name on any of the Internet name servers and email, web, etc is not able to work.

The problem is that the host we are moving from is being unhelpful, whether out of malice or not. And there is nothing we can do about it. We just have to wait for the new record ownership to percolate through the Internet name servers.

Their customer service is not great; but at least we have the consolation of knowing that we were right to want to make the move!