Nightmare on Web Street Winner

In the spirit (pun intended) of Halloween, Hyperic sponsored a Nightmare on Web Street contest, where folks were encouraged to tell their grim tales of IT woe for a chance at trick-or-treating for a Wii! The day has come, and the contest winner has been selected. Without further ado, I would like to congratulate “Mr Anderson” for his nightmarish tale of servers and HTML. Here’s the winning entry folks:

Oh by the way, your websites will no longer be hosted in 4 days

In spring of 2002 I was called in by a Company to help them with their websites (I wasn’t an employee at that time, I had a small shop of about 10 guys doing web development/business systems).

The issue? Their Host went bankrupt and they had 4 days to move 100+ sites with 50+ pages each off their servers before the plug was pulled.

If this didn’t go right, 80,000 plus doctors around the country would be very unhappy – they use the sites to look for Continuing Medical Education seminars, register, make payments, keep track of their certificates, etc. the Company would lose a LOT of money.

So – no big deal, right? Just access the servers and pull the code off and put it on our servers.

SORRY – the Hosting Vendor of the Company actually outsourced the hosting to another vendor whom they hadn’t paid and they refused to give us access at all! With the short amount of time that we had, I pulled my entire team together to go to every page, save as html, fix the image src tags and everything else and rebuild the sites by hand as static HTML (no database driven content). We got their sites back up in 1/2 day before the plug got pulled, and then a week or two later launched a Content Management system for them to be able to keep the content up to date.

This took a team of 6 72+ hours of work. Non-stop. 3 all nighters in a row with interspersing of Colin Powell 20 Minute Power Naps.

Needless to say, the Company was very happy we could rescue them, and now that I’ve moved on from owning my own company they have very happily employed me.

Congratulations, Mr Anderson, your Wii will be in the mail this week!

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