webhosting

I hate incompetence.

What is more, I hate when professionals are incompetent.

What is even more, I hate when experts in a field are incompetent. In their own field.

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This morning started very nice with light snowfall, and sunlight streaming through the clouds. My son had just got out of bed, we had breakfast and enjoyed the joys of the morning. I took him to school, and went to my office.

I then started to check my e-mails. Deleted most of them as usual, and started reading an email from a business partner that I have dealt with over many years. His business is hosting websites, and he has been my preferred hosting partner since I left the hosting and webdevelopment business in 2001.

Out of the blue, he wrote that he had removed a table in my database, due to extensive amounts of data collected and stored in it (1.2 Gb). Yes, he deleted it without my confirmation. Yes, it turned out to be a vital part part of the core of the website CMS. No, I did not like the fact that the website (this blog, actually), had been down for more than 8 hours.

He had worried that the database table had collected too much information, and that the functionality slowed down the server. So he just decided to remove the table itself.

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When I read the email I did not reccognize the name of the table, so I did not think too much about it. Then I went to the site to check if it had any impact. BOY! Did I get surprised! My blog was no longer a blog. It had turned into a mile long page of SQL-errors. It turns out the table he deleted is a vital part of the system, collecting log data. And since this is a security site, it seems to attract a lot of script kiddies that try to mess around here (no, I do not understand why they do that...).

When I discovered this, I had to spend the morning fixing. It did not take more than 30 mins before I had it all back and running, including a security update. But I am still angry, I am still questioning the competence of that expert, and I am seriously considering ending a business relationship that has lasted over many years.

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What would you do in this situation? How would you react? What would you do to prevent such things to happen again in the future?

Cartoon from http://www.cartoonchurch.com/blog/