Can you afford to have your servers down for five days?

9:18 EDT on 29 September 2008: Well, I have not heard from AITCOM. No calls, despited the notation in the trouble ticket to contact me. Ms. Hall left her shift yesterday afternoon without calling me as she promised she would. My customers web sites seem to be functioning at their two-month-old backup state, but I won't know that for a certainty until each of them has had an opportunity to check them and restore their latest files.

Since I have not heard from AITCOM, I don't have an explanation for my customers as to why the server went down, why it took so long to restore it, or why the only backup they could find was two months old. I cannot imagine that there is a reasonable explanation for such incompetence as AITCOM has exhibited during this problem and I will be very embarrassed to attempt to explain it to my customers. What should I tell them when they ask what is the guarantee that they won't be down, again, sometime for five days. If I were my customers, I would move to another hosting company. I'll keep you posted.

But, back to my problem. My control panel still does not function and the trouble ticket has not been closed by AITCOM. With the control panel lacking functionality, I cannot restore the domains and e-mail addresses that are missing from the backup restoration, missing because they were installed subsequent to the backup file creation two months ago.

I requested a callback in this new ticket and it will be most interesting to see if AITCOM actually complies with its own policy--according to the ticket procedure. And even more interesting to see if one of its executives calls me with an explanation and apology for the egregisously incompent and cavalier "service" I have received during this problem.

Can you afford to have your servers down for five days? Can you afford not to receive your business e-mail for five days? If so, then perhaps AITCOM.net is the hosting company for you. If not, well . . . ?