Month: June 2011

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).