Lovable Customers

Been having a really tough 24 hours. Our hosting providers made some changes that led to huge snafus for Skyrove and our customers. Most of the damage has been repaired, but some people are still affected. We sent out this notice earlier today:

Dear Skyrove Provider,

On 26 February around 13:00 our Website Hosting Providers moved our server equipment to a new data center without notice.

As a result, the domain for www.skyrove.com received a new IP address and the custom domain auth.skyrove.com, which refers to our South African dedicated server, was erroneously removed from their DNS servers.

This was only noticed several hours later, and, in some cases not at all, by DNS servers in South Africa. We discovered the error at 18:30 South African time and Totalchoice Hosting fixed their error at 19:00.

However, just as the error was only perceived a few hours later, it would now take the fix some time to propagate as well and as a result some hotspots were down for as much as 2 hours longer.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused to you and Skyrove members using your facilities.

We will take on the matter with our hosting providers and work together on ways to prevent further errors of this kind.

Best regards,
Henk and Allister

A short while later we received the following response from Cliff Linton-Walls at the e-mouse Internet Cafe in Muizenberg:

Hi Allister,

This is absolutely disgraceful. How can you call yourself a South African when you provide service like this.
In South Africa, it is expected that a company will NOT, under any circumstances indicate to it's customers that a problem has or may have occurred, until that problem has been highlighted in the MEDIA and a response is therefore inevitable.
Even then, that response should NEVER, under any circumstances, provide any details of the problem, (ensuring that customers remain uncertain about possible future service irregularities), and also, such response should never promise to correct nor limit the potential for the problem to re-occur in the future.

** I hope you will appreciate that the above is intended as sarcastic humour..

Well done on minimising the downtime to such a short period of time, under the circumstances.

And excellent service for providing us with an immediate, detailed and understandable explanation.

Cliff

Thanks for helping us laugh a bit throughout all the stress, Cliff!

It's 'Tips for Trevor' time again.

Here's mine:

"Internet, internet, internet! South African micro-entrepreneurs can immediately start benefiting from accessing the global marketplace via the internet.

Yet Financial Legislation makes it impossible for the small entrepreneur to easily receive foreign currency. E.g. my 12 year old nephew in Holland is constantly trading goods on eBay and sends and receives money via email using a service called PayPal. We now have PayPal in South Africa, but it can only be used to SEND money, not receive it!

Larger companies are constantly finding ways around these regulations in either case, but small entrepreneurs are left behind and aren't able to easily sell their products on this massive international market.

Come on Mr Manual, show us that you know it's the 21st century and remove restrictions that stifles internet trade."

If you agree, please go to the Tips for Trevor website and leave a similar message! If enough people campaign for free internet trade it could dramatically change the South African economic landscape.