It's back but.......

JW, thankyou for reconsidering the future of this thread.

It might be back but the site is running extremely slowly. 

Well site back up and running as fast as it has ever been, but to be fair that has never been one of my complaints, just want it to work consistantly with fewer outages or blank pages. if you look on the other thread you will see i am having a problem explaining to AD why it is an issue!!

I was a bit miffed to see it closed but I did post without first observing Daniel's apologies.  I still find it very supprising that the web site which the Club and members must be becoming more dependant on was out for so long. As has been asked, in Daniel's thread where were the backups?

peedee

It does seem slow tonight, as Simon said. Still getting steam up, perhaps?

To be fair to the CC how many other sites that you use, probably go down for a similar length of time, but you never realise. The only reason we notice with the Caravan Club web site is because of CT. If we were only using it for booking sites etc, the chances are we would never notice.

It's not the only forum I use, Steve, but it's the only one that crashes on a frequent basis.

It certainly does not seem to be resourced adequately, many commercial companies just would not tolerate lengthy downtimes like this week.

peedee

From the CC's point of view I would think CT is a bit of a irrelevance but from a business point of view they must be concern with a protracted downtime.  Bet the managers of Insurance, Travel and Sites in particular were pretty unhappy.

as has been said above, more and more of the clubs business relies on its computer system...even with the 'workaround' of taking bookings and lgging interest in insurances over the phone etc, all these 'notes' have to be retrospectively entered once the system is back up and running.

i dont know if this part of the CC operation is outsourced....ie run and managed by some other specialist company or is still run by CC themselves...

having been very involved with outsourcing the IT operations of a 'very' large company, one of the big benefits is the incorporation of all the 'best practice' processes that are being used across the outsourcers portfolio...

not that it reached this point, but Disaster Recovery would be one of these processes that would be developed with a customer as part of that 'scaled up' operation.

however, before outages reach 'disaster' levels (and this is different for each business) they will have to rely on their own ability to recover swiftly and accurately from this sort of 'blip'.

sounds like they did what was required (we're back and all seems to be working......and we hope all the lost data is back in place) but its the blank face of a business thats projected once its customer facing services are removed for any length of time that can hurt a reputation.

good, timely, accurate, understandable, periodic updates (on an banner page) go a long way to salving irate customers' blood pressure....

i realise how difficult it is to predict successful recovery (been there in the middle of the night many, many times) but remember to try and give more info than 'system down, try later'.....

the club is improving in this area, possibly as a response to criticism on this forum, so well done in the recovery....

these things happen in IT, its how well systems are recovered and how well customers are informed that sort the wheat from the chaff....