Electricity issues all around!

Apparently I’m not alone with UPS problems, looks like even the big boys over at del.icio.us have been having more than their fair share of UPS issues. It’s only when you need the UPS you really find out if it’s up to the job!

I have to take my hat off to them and complement them with the amount of feedback they are providing letting every body know what’s going on. Great work!

Todays issue of Computing ran an article on the Power Shortages in IT, whilst it’s great to see the IT arena (and especially eCommerce) taking off so well after all we have been through since 2000 it is alarming to think about the amount of juice we are using. Something tells me with all the electric being consumed in London my self and del.icio.us won’t be the only ones blogging about UPS problems.

So if you are relying on a UPS go give it a test now and if it’s not been exercised in a while (6+ months), go give it a deep discharge (when your computers not to busy), charge it up again then test it again. Do it whilst you don’t need it – next time you may just have spent an hour writing your blog for the electric to fail and the UPS to shut down with it!.

I should probably mention that whilst my UPS let me down just recently, it’s been good for about 3 years now and saved me a numerous times, the power in my part of Cambridge has been somewhat unreliable, I bought the best of the consumer market devices, it runs 3 machines and 2 monitors with about 60% load – and if the power stays off for more than a blip I know its going to be off for hours so everything gets shut down cleanly and I plug the TV into the UPS! – that’s assuming it’s to dark to read otherwise Id be reading one of my many books, ok, maybe Id also be heading off to the pub - for erm, food you know!


Note to del.icio.us - Great name!, just somewhat of a nightmare for us dyslexics that can’t spell! You can only imagine the attempts I have at entering the URL! Odd how I can spell dyslexia though.

My thought for today - it's when things go wrong that you really find out who you are dealing with.

Does the issue get covered up? Does it get swept under the carpet? Do you get a run around? Or are you dealing with a great company that knows how important it's customers are to take the time and write blog entries to let you know what's going on and communicate their pain with you.

The company I previously used for hosting are know offering a great deal on bandwidth (odd, they had a totally terrible deal before, now it's gone to unlimited - from one extream to the other!), still I know their business practices are anti-customer and the customer support is truly poor so no chance of me returning to them, on the other hand EV1 Server have just been fantastic!