RISKVUE ARCHIVE | FEATURE STORIES

Internet Service Provider Fly-By-Nights—A Cautionary Tale

If you tried to log on to Warren, McVeigh and Griffin, Inc.’s Web site between December 28, 1998, and January 20, 1999, you may have gotten the following message:

Unable to locate the server www.griffincom.com.
Please check the server name and try again.

Our Internet Service Provider went bankrupt and shut down without warning. Until that moment, we had no idea how much we had come to rely on the Internet. Over the next three weeks, we had to use the telephone to communicate with people. To do research, we actually drove to the library and looked through book pages, instead of Web pages. Worst of all, there was a sense of lost identity. If we do not exist in cyber space, do we really exist? While this may seem a bit extreme, many companies’ entire identity is based on their Web presence. For example, Amazon without the dot com is a large river in South America. And what is eBay without the e? It is a place to dock your boat. These companies rely on their Web sites not only to sell products, but also to portray an image, an identity that customers come to respect and trust.

We were lucky to have our Web site vanish when it did. In January, our Web site existed solely as a place for information about our products and services. Since then, it has changed dramatically. We now have e-commerce and Policy Express, a special pay-for-access site. Three weeks of downtime now would translate into lost Web sales and angry customers who are unable to access a service they paid for. More and more companies use their Web site, e-mail and Internet connection as a central way of doing business.

If your company has a Web site, the following steps can help you avoid problems with your ISP.

(1) Make sure your Webmaster keeps duplicate files of your entire Web site, including all component text and graphic files. If your Webmaster function is outsourced, keep duplicates onsite as well.

(2) Choose a reliable and service-oriented ISP that will be in business for years to come. Remember what we learned: If it is too good to be true, it is.

• Check the history and financial background of the company to make sure they have the potential to give long-term service.
• Test their customer service and technical support capabilities. If you call, and cannot talk to a live person within five minutes, their service departments are most likely understaffed and over- burdened. Go with someone else. Ask for references of people who have been using the service for over a year. Call these people and find out if service interruptions are common, and if the ISP reacts well to customer problems.
• Shop around for the right price. With growing ISP competition, you may be able to get a faster connection at a lower price.

(3) Consider segregating your exposures. You may want to have one company host your Web site and e-mail accounts, while another handles your Internet connection. That way, if something happens to your Web site and e-mail accounts, you will still have an Internet connection, and if something happens to your Internet connection, you will still have your Web site and e-mail accounts.

(4) Make sure your domain name registration information is correct and up-to-date. To do this, go to www.networksolutions.com and type in your domain name. It will bring back important information about your Web site. Check to see if all of the contact information is correct. Incorrect information will slow the process when you attempt to switch ISPs in the future.

(5) Have at least one e-mail account in the office that is not tied into the main e-mail accounts associated with your Web site. For example, all of our e-mail accounts are based upon griffincom.com, as in mcovas@griffincom.com. We also have a separate e-mail account, griffcom@ix.netcom.com, just in case our e-mail system goes down. 

riskVue | The webzine for risk management professionals
June 1999