So Grasshopper, the toll-free number service that I use here at Sunray as well as at Sunriver Vacations, is in the middle of a serious outage (going on the second day now). They’ve been updating as well on their Facebook page and twitter feed. Basically, from what I can tell (and since their communication has sucked during this whole thing, I don’t know 100% what’s happening), it sounds like something at their main data center kicked the bucket, and then they kicked into disaster recovery mode, and their backup plans failed, too.
Anyway, while the set-up for Sunriver Vacations is a bit complicated (low call volume, but equally rotated between a few companies, along with a few “press 1 to speak to blah-blah” type of options), the setup for Sunray is fairly simple. We basically have our main 800 number ported over to them, and have it forward to a phone number here. After closing time, it will play a message where folks can leave a voicemail or press a number to be forward to after-hours staff. Nothing really exciting, but their per-minute rate was much cheaper than what we were paying for 800 number service before, and the free voice studio stuff was a nice feature.
That being said, being down for over 24 hours is a huge problem, and is costing the companies I work for some good money. I’ve managed to setup a temporary toll-free number thanks to a local vendor/partner company and published it on our Web site, but a lot of people and web sites have that main toll-free number published.
While I don’t know if I’ll move to another service (just depends on how Grasshopper responds to all this, once they’re back up and running), I would like to have some options. What’s everybody out there using for small business 800-number service?
Lesson learned here? Test your disaster recovery plans. This can’t be emphasized enough, and reminds me that I need to do the same (it’s been a while).
Comments
I too am severely impacted by this. I’ve just established a second business that shares a toll-free number. Fortunately, I have a form on my site for customers to contact me, but it has impacted my fax service as well. Grasshopper failed to notify me of any outage. I had to be notified by a customer via e-mail. I’d be willing to bet that this system is sitting in someone’s basement somewhere, with no DR site. There’s probably only a handful of employees at this company as well. Not sure how I’ll respond to this but in the mean time, I’m taking all calls on a personal cell phone, and my websites have been updated. Let me know if you find a better service out there.
Wrote a little about it on our blog too. A friend of mine has lost thousands in the last two days. They won’t answer their own phones or really respond to anything. Seems really strange to me. Any recommendations?
Try Onebox out. The system hasn’t gone down in years, and is feature rich.
@Bobby: I’ve had Grasshopper for 5 years, and this is their first downtime that I’ve dealt with. Stuff happens, I know, so “hasn’t gone down in years” isn’t really a selling point. A selling point to me would be “if we go down, here’s what we do to get back up as soon as frackin’ possible”. 🙂
This has impacted my business hard. The only reason I even know our phones were down is by an existing customer emailing us. I have been with this company for 7 years (When it was GotVmail). This has cost me thousands of dollars… I changed the number on my website today to bypass the system… It is unbelievable that they did not have a backup and they did not have the courtesy to email everyone and let them know about the problem… I am thinking about going to OneBox… I have been looking at them for a while… To say that I am pissed of would be an understatement! It sounds like they might have lost all the data as well, so that probably means I will have to get new recordings made again. They response to this situation is about as bad as I have ever seen…
This system down time with no backup is unacceptable any responsible business would have sufficient backups for data and websites. I have been with grasshopper since they were gotvmail. I have had a lot of choppy service this year. I would like to see them stay in business as they offer a good service when it is working, but at this point the damages to my company may be severe. I had a customer that was supposed to call me back today to place an order for over $8,000 and had another customer that was inquiring about a piece that cost $13,000, if I lost both of these sales due to this outage I will have lost almost $5,000 in profit, not to mention all the small sales I get daily. People do not buy high ticket items without talking on the phone 80% of the time. At this point this is very bad for our business, I hate to be one of many to make a good company fall, but who could rule out a good lawsuit possibility at this time. After being down for over a day earlier this year I did not even get so much as a free months service for the downtime and may have lost $1000’s in sales that day. I will withhold my name for now as I do not want to Jeopardize myself if I decide to sue grasshopper with others, but I do have anonymous email [email protected]. Right now I am really irritated and don’t know if I should keep incurring damages by waiting since there is no time line or if I should immediately move to a new company to try to cut my losses. I hope they get this fixed immediately. I thinks its pathetic for a company to go down over a supposed server failure and I find it highly suspicious that the pricing is down and not the rest of the website?. Somebody needs to come clean quickly.
We used onebox for years but stopped only due to cost and less of a need. We use google voice as a non 800 voicemail system but with much less features (ie none).