Lunarpages - It's A Big Truck

Lunarpages - it's a big truck

I've been helping a friend with a site hosted at Lunarpages for a few years, a very low traffic business site in a shared hosting account, no real complaints.

But 48 hours ago they got an odd email from Lunarpages describing the relocation of their server to a new datacenter, which involved 3-4 hours of downtime to drive the server from LA to San Diego, plus another hour or so of setup.

Now this was confusing because I thought that the internet was not a big truck -- it's a series of tubes, right? In fact, I thought that the whole point of the internet was not having to move your data by truck. But hey, this is an inexpensive shared account, so maybe Lunarpages does move all their data by truck. Kinda short notice on that, but okay, fine. A couple hours downtime.
The website and email go dead at noon. The exact time was not announced in the notice, and mid-day mid-week seems like an odd time to deliberately schedule downtime, especially when it involves a long drive in traffic on the 5 freeway. But it is an inexpensive account, so... we wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Six hours later, we contact Lunarpages support asking what's up with the server. This being my friend's business website, business email, gone for most of the day. Was there an accident on the freeway? Did the truck driver get lost? Did the data end up in a cul-de-sac in Orange County? Were they stopped while making a run for the border?

An hour later, we finally hear back on the ticket -- Lunarpages hasn't heard from their "admins" (presumably due to a bad battery in their CB radio) but they hope to have things migrated "soon."
So we wait.

Eleven hours after the site and email went down, we send a reply on the ticket asking a few more questions. 1) Any update on that migration? 2) Could you explain this whole deal with the truck driving the data from city to city? 3) Do you have any compensation for ridiculous downtime?
An hour later, the Lunarpages reply: Migration done soon. Sorry for the inconvenience. No compensation at all, especially for "scheduled" downtime.

As of now, the server is still down and has been offline for about 14 hours. While I do hope the driver of the truck is okay, I have no such benevolent feelings for Lunarpages. When (if??) the site comes back up, we're transferring to a host that doesn't rely on the the LA freeway system to migrate their data. I hear there's this newfangled "network" thing the kids are in to. We'll probably try that out instead.

Lunarpages sure is cheap. And most of the time, they work okay. But you should probably avoid them if you value advance scheduling of downtime, rapid support, clear communication, or reliable access to your website and email.