Revealed: Lessons from WebCentral's 72-hour email outage

Next steps

“We understand this was a large outage,” Gore says. “We have identified a number of changes we will make.”

The first step, Gore said, is to improve the means by which WebCentral can communicate with customers during an outage.

It will build a new ‘service status page’ on its website with a greater amount of detail.

There will also be a new phone system installed to handle higher volumes.

And while he won’t get too specific, Gore said the company will make “significant changes to the way we deploy and manage our storage environment.”

“When you buy hardware for shared hosting, its hard to get the hardware vendors to agree to SLAs [service level agreements],” he said. “They know there is a flow on affect to thousands of customers and that the infrastructure it supports changes dramatically over time.”

Gore said he has heard the numerous calls from affected customers for some kind of compensation, a matter that has been referred to Melbourne IT’s board.