wheel - 3:06 pm on Jan 6, 2011 (gmt 0)

Yesterday they decided to re-assign IPs on a dedicated server without telling anyone

Holy crow, that's crazy. That would basically take me right offline.
My provider was offline once I think in all the years I've been with them. I know they are failover crazy and that they know what they're doing. But they also keep us up to date.

When they went offline (result of a contracter shutting down both their cooling system and their failover cooling system) they did stuff like send an email saying 'data center temps too high, on my way to center to investigate' followed by 'at data center, cooling system offline and backup offline, cycling both right now', 'cooling systems back online, temps returning to normal. And two days later a complete report detailing what they contractor had done and the steps they'd taken to ensure it didn't happen again.

So I read the emails and didn't get excited. The data center guy was working on the problem and I had an idea of what was going on and what it would take to get it going again.

If he'd skipped the emails, I'd have spent my day figuring out what was going on, and trying to reach him, all at very elevated excitement levels. Instead I didn't miss a beat.