rise2it - 7:21 pm on Feb 22, 2010 (gmt 0)

The choice is up to you, but I chose on late Sat/early Sunday to not trust this would be a quick fix, and pointed the DNS records to a backup server.

While we've still lost a LOT of business (because of the time it takes the Domain Name records to update), we're not dead in the water. (Luckily, we don't have our online databases there, as some of you did...so it's basically just webpages and email).

For those sitting on the fence, I'd recommend grabbing some cheap hosting elsewhere, and uploading your files (at at least one static page for your customers to see even if you for some reason do not have your own backup files). Once you change the DNS entries, you'll start to get some business trickling in within 3 or 4 hours.

Once Westhost gets this fixed, you can then point your stuff back to their servers.

My BIGGEST gripe with them isn't that the site is down, but that the results they are serving are still 403/404....surely they could have at least routed something for our affected domains so at least the customer would see a webpage letting them know there was a tech issue, instead of the customer seeing nothing and thinking we were no longer in business - and I have spent today fielding THOSE types of calls.

There have been a couple of comments on other forums that some of the sites have DID get restored are now down AGAIN, and unfortunately I think this situation will continue to play out this way over the next few days, and maybe longer, as they swap hardware, restore backups, etc.