The last week and a half here at Web-Empire we saw some trying times – namely we discovered on Thursday the 15th of January that we had no internet access from the office. What could it be? We went through checking everything – it turned out that our ISP had entered into a dispute with their provider of broadband connections, and so about 6000 people had their broadband cut off.

Disaster!

We couldn’t get through to the company, nor the company that had recently bought it up. So the Web-Empire team did the only sensible thing they could do and decamped to a local-ish pub that has free wifi. The only issue with this was that it entailed spending more time at a laptop than is ergonomically sensible and some people find noise and music more distracting than others. But we were able to function and keep up with business.

About a week after we were cut off we finally managed to get through the queue on the phone and got a temporary account with another company (owned by the big company that had bought up our original ISP).

Until we could get through to the company we were stuck as without being able to get a MAC code out of them we couldn’t even go to another company and buy another broadband subscription! The effect that such an event can have on small and medium businesses is astounding. If we had not all had laptops then we would not have been able to work; and even then the disruption and time taken dealing with the issue delayed work.

We were lucky not to be more affected. Also, this shows one very good reason why people should not host websites via broadband – this is a big no no. If Web-Empire had been doing this then all the sites we host would have been down. Instead, we have servers in nice shiny data centers with backup power and redundant connectivity.

We only mention this as we still often hear of people hosting websites in this way. There will be a follow up post on the ins and outs of hosting, for those who are interested to learn more.

We felt it was only fair to keep you all abreast of the situation; and we find ourselves wondering how many other businesses have been affected by this dispute? For all those who were affected – good luck from all of us here at Web-Empire.