The Perils of Outsourced IT

I'm not vain enough to expect anyone noticed, but I've been offline (totally, 404, etc) since sometime on Friday. This was because I decided to ditch the over-priced, under-capable web-hosting company I've been using and switch to a new one. I thought I'd manage to do it all in the early hours of Saturday morning, but (following my very polite request to 'take my business elsewhere') they decided to do all the things that disabled access to lewisham.org.uk on their hosts, promptly at 5pm on Friday evening ...and wait until Monday morning (and several emails and a phone call from me) before they did the bit that enabled my new 'chosen business partner' to take over the domain. By which time, of course, I was out for meetings at work, and couldn't do all the other things (that I'd expected to do on Friday night or Saturday) to get things set-up, and back to the point where I can blog again.

So, thanks for not much, Globalgold (no, you're not getting a link!), and I hope lewisham.org.uk will thrive at 123-Reg (which is part of Pipex, which has been around the Internet even longer than I have).

Of course, with just a mere 8Mb ADSL service to my house (at my expense, please note, not the Council-tax-payers of Lewisham!), I don't have much choice but to outsource essential IT services such as web-hosting. Lewisham Council has no such excuse, but nonetheless decided to "outsource it's brain" (my description, when I argued, unsuccessfully, against the Council Leader who was determined to do this in 2000. Their 'chosen business partner' (chosen from a short-list of one) was Fujitsu Services, who have done a magnificent job of proving me right (indeed, a master of understatement) for the past 5 years. I'm pleased that Mayor Steve Bullock has taken the brave decision to dump them, terminating the contract early), and contracting with Sungard Vivista to take over some of it (with some functions coming back in-house).

I sincerely hope my experience isn't a tiny reflection of the Council's... Well, I suppose I could offer to keep the lewisham.gov.uk website up-and-running at lewisham.org.uk ;->