Anna Arthur woke up one morning and her website had disappeared. Her host, Easynet, had lost it. Melanie Henwood was even more upset when her MSN mail service vanished for a weekend, but mail problems are not unusual. Although service providers boast about their advanced technologies, the internet is in fact less reliable than electricity or gas, or even the normal telephone service. So what are you going to do about it?
If you are a home or occasional user, the glitches are not worth losing sleep over. If you are a big company, your technical staff should have made sure your systems are resilient enough to keep going in adverse circumstances. But if you run a small business, minor problems could have catastrophic effects.
Bridget Daley runs a guest house in the Alps, and much of her business comes from the UK via her website at www.lesalpes.co.uk. The site was still there when the host, Entweb, ran into problems, but both the booking form and her email stopped working. No bookings, no business.
No one had warned her that, to provide a back up, forms should be sent to two different addresses.
Another Entweb user, Mike Holland of Smye Holland Associates, also had website problems. "When it stopped working," he says, "we couldn't communicate with anyone at Entweb, nor could we reclaim our domain name and move it somewhere else." The site did reappear eventually, but from an out-of-date back-up copy. "There we were in June, with a website that said Merry Christmas. It was extremely embarrassing because the web has become such a l arge part of our business," says Holland.
What customers did not know at the time was that Entweb was being taken over. There was a period of chaos, but when Holland established contact with the new management he found them responsive and he is still using their service. "But it has made us focus on how vulner able we are, and we now have a back-up strategy," he says.
Unfortunately, Anna Arthur, who runs an arts and media PR company, didn't. She says she contacted Easynet when her company's website disappeared only to be told they couldn't find it. "They said: 'We have the details here but it doesn't look as though you've uploaded anything.'" The site had been uploaded by an outside designer, who had just gone to Singapore.
Paul Ockenden, technical director of CST Group, a combined marketing and IT services company in Brighton, says: "It's quite common for hosts not to have back-ups. If you are designing sites and uploading them, they assume you will have a copy - and you should have. That's especially important if you have used an outside agency to do the design work."
Those not involved in the business may assume that using a professional designer and a professional hosting company is enough. It isn't.
However, Melanie Henwood, a health and social care analyst, was just one of thousands who suffered while MSN switched users from a standard POP3 email server to a web-based Hotmail system.
An MSN spokesman admitted there had been problems migrating customers from what had been a paid-for service to a free one. Microsoft had fixed up an MSN webmail system so customers could keep the same email address and continue to use Outlook Express to collect their mail, if they wanted. So far, so good. Unfortunately, it forgot to tell them they had to log on via the web first, to accept the new terms and conditions, before collecting their email in the usual way. They could not do that from Outlook Express.
A second problem was that users had to know their password to log on via the web. Thousands didn't have a clue what their password was, because Outlook Express had remembered it for them.
"We had to do a lot of password resets," says MSN, "which sounds simple but is an involved process." The help lines were swamped. And although MSN says "no email has been lost" and that things have quietened down now, it is too late for Heywood. She has switched to Tiscali.
Almost all email services have had problems, so everyone should use at least two. It may be worth buying a domain name - a unique internet address. The company that hosts the domain name can be asked to point mail to any server so you can still use a commercial mail service.
However, if you want to change your supplier, you can have your email redirected without changing your email address. The problem is that you may need to learn more about the net than you really want to know.
Partly it's a historical problem. Most individuals and small businesses didn't want to invest a lot of money when they first ventured on to the net: they wanted to find out if it was worthwhile. As a result, they experimented with cheap or free services, or tried package deals offering everything for a small monthly fee. And if their chosen company ran into technical or financial problems, they suffered.
"Never put all your eggs in one basket," says Andrew Baker, technical director of Teledesign Solutions in Welwyn Garden City. "You should have a Plan B installed, tested and working." In his case, that means a high-speed digital line from BT as well as cable internet from NTL.
With so many "virtual" providers around, make sure that the alternative really is different. For example, a company that sells an "alternative" service to BT could be re-selling a service operated by BT using the same exchanges, the same lines, and the same servers. If one goes down, they both go down.
Ockenden says that when it comes to hosting websites, "If people can afford it, they're going to be safer using their own server in a rack, rather than renting disk space. But then you're talking low thousands rather than hundreds of pounds a year."
Alas, that still isn't foolproof. Baker remembers setting up one client's system, which included a virtual private network, where they put their own equipment in a (non-BT) telephone exchange. What they hadn't anticipated was one of the telephone company's contractors simply unplugging it.
