It should be noted that, while the events below did actually occur, the name of "Travis T." is not real. The actual name was changed to Travis so that Travis wouldn't receive any potential backlash.
In July 2007, Travis T. was hired as a production artist to a niche graphics and design company. Travis filled the generic stereotype of a graphic designer quite well. He was young, still working his way through school, and versed not just in print design, but software development as well. He knew PHP, HTML, CSS, and whatever other acronyms were necessary to the development of modern-day websites. Like most graphic designers, he wanted projects he could sink his teeth into, and like many designers at the beginning of their careers, he didn't know when to politely decline a creative challenge from his employers.
For their part, Travis' employers had caught the MySpace bug. They couldn't speak intelligently on social networking, or even the Internet in particular, but one of them had just learned that MySpace was the place all the cool kids were going to, and his company had to be represented. Naturally, Travis went to work on a MySpace profile with gusto. Creating an attractive MySpace profile is not easy. Creating one that looks good requires creativity, ingenuity, and a willingness to bash one's head against a wall. Travis had these in spades. He was able to introduce a brand new layout with custom colors, precisely placed images, custom fonts, and even a slideshow of the more popular products. His employers loved it. It only took a few days to acquire a sizable number of friends, and that was without interacting with the community. In fact, there was no intention of interacting with the community. It was lost on Travis' employers that regular community involvement was essential to succeed on MySpace. They had their MySpace “business card”, and that was all they wanted. Travis went from a lowly production artist to a valuable asset within the span of a few weeks.
With the MySpace issue out of the way, attention returned to the company website. His company had signed up for a hosting account with a company called Verio sometime in 2000. Verio was founded in 1996, incorporated through the efforts and resources of private investors, and partial funding through Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, the largest telecommunications company in Japan. Verio's business model involved buying out local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that had already made a name for themselves in a local market. This allowed Verio to develop a large national presence without having to develop the talent and resources the purchased ISPs already had. This was very lucrative for Verio, and by 2000, just four years later, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone was ready to stop being an investor and start being an owner. In the fall of 2000, NTT bought Verio for somewhere around five billion dollars. After this, Verio abandoned the consumer ISP market, and began focusing on providing service to small-to-medium businesses.
No one could remember who made the decision to go with Verio, but neither did anyone care. For the executives of the company, websites were like business cards. Companies need at least one, and no one cared much beyond that. Travis' MySpace success had, however, brought about renewed interest in the site, and it was decided that the website could use a makeover. Travis was promptly given the information he needed and took a look. The website was woefully out of date and lacking in quality. Not only did it not comply with today's production standards, it didn't comply with the standards of when it was created. Travis realized a complete change was needed. He also saw that the website only displayed samples of the company's products; clients had to order a catalog to know the full range. That meant a true online gallery was the first order of business. After that, an online ordering system, and then a modern, standards-compliant design.
Verio already supplied a third-party package for this purpose called, somewhat ironically, “Gallery”. It was server-side application, which meant that the software was executed before the web browser received the web page. Gallery itself generated the web page in question and the server delivered it to the browser. To maintain information on the product images, things like name, product number, descriptions, and so forth, Gallery had to access a database. Verio also supplied a database called MySQL for clients to use. The problem was accessing information on either software package. Or the website itself for that matter.
Modern websites, especially those for businesses, come with an administration page. In this case, an administration page refers to a special web page that is not available to the general web visitor. Someone in charge of maintaining the website will use this administration page to create or delete email accounts, check what services are being provided to the website, who has visited the site, how often, and so forth. The problem was that while the main website itself displayed pages at a reasonable speed, the administrative page didn't. Travis at one point timed the page taking a full ten minutes to load. In the high speed age of the Internet, this was unacceptable. It wasn't just the administrative page, either. It appeared as if anything other than a basic HTML page ran extremely slow. So slow in fact that Travis installed a copy of Gallery and MySQL on his workstation just so that he could get some basic work done.
Phone calls to Verio were not helpful. Customer support technicians kept reading to him from a script with pre-written answers. It's possible, however, that there was little incentive to discover or fix the issue. As it turned out, the company account had become obsolete. What's more, the computer Verio was using to host the website used an operating system called Irix. Irix was obsolete due to the fact that the creator of the operating system, Silicon Graphics, had declared the product line was discontinued. In addition, Silicon Graphics made software for high-end 3D graphics, and Irix reflected that interest. This made it an odd choice, especially in light of freely available operating systems like FreeBSD, which is one of the most common choices for web server operating systems today.
Travis saw it was time to move the website to something more modern. He compiled a list of companies to should look at for a new hosting plan. Included in this list was Verio's “Hosting 3000” plan. Travis included it merely as a nod to Verio, but it was not his recommended pick. Unfortunately, Travis had no decision-making authority, and while he had laid down his arguments as best he could, his employers decided to go back to Verio. Verio was a familiar name to them, and therefore more trustworthy. Although it wasn't his first choice, Travis contacted Verio to set up a second web-hosting account. The plan was to slowly move web pages and data over to ensure smooth transition from the old account to the new one. The Verio support rep made clear that the last act of the transition, the DNS changeover, would have to be done by Travis himself. It was company policy. Travis had also received emails to this effect. Despite this, however, someone at Verio made the decision to change the DNS entries anyway, without Travis' knowledge or consent.
Verio's behavior notwithstanding, it is important to understand why changing the DNS entries was such a big issue. DNS is an acronym for “Domain Name System”. On networks, computers generally locate each other using a set of numbers such as “196.255.45.1”. This is somewhat unwieldy for a human to remember, so domain names are assigned to each numeric address, and are usually in the form of domain names names like “www.verio.com”. It's like the difference between saying “4485 Somewhere Ave” all the time, or saying “Frank's place”. The reason only Travis was supposed to change the DNS was because the company's domain name still pointed to the old website account. When Verio changed the DNS entry, the web name now directed web browsers to the new website account, which already had some pages in place, but nothing else. The company's email service, which also depended on the DNS system went down without warning, preventing the sales department from sending or receiving vital email. In addition, many salespeople did not store the email on their workstations. Because of the habit of clients to attach sample art to their emails, many salespeople left the messages on the web server to save space. Those messages were now gone.
Because he had no idea what Verio had done, Travis worked frantically to both find the cause and find a workaround for the sales people until the situation was brought back to normal. To get information on the email settings, he tried to access the website administration page. He quickly discovered he could not do this. Because of the DNS switch, the website administration page that appeared was for the new website account, not the old one. It had no information on the email issue and was thus useless. It took three or four phone calls before Travis could find a customer service rep who was willing to do more than deliver stock answers. When it was discovered that Verio had changed the DNS, Travis ordered the rep to give him the numeric address of the old site, and to copy the email data from the old site to the new one so that the sales department could access their email. Everything was restored to order by the end of the day, but for Travis the damage had been done. Most at the company were not computer savvy. For them, the simplest answer was the best, and the simplest answer was that Travis had recommended the upgrade, so therefore Travis was at fault. Travis' star was falling, and he knew it. Travis redoubled his efforts on the website, sure that the improvements he was developing would show his value to his employers. Unfortunately, Verio once again changed something without telling him. And once again, the sales department became aware of it before he did. Verio had instituted a size limit on email attachments.
To understand why this was an important issue, one must understand that businesses in general have latched on to the concept of email in a way that no other product of the Internet has matched. The ability to communicate at one's convenience was something salespeople and executives understood and embraced almost immediately. The fact that email can contain attachments only added to the value. For Travis' company, this was a particularly important point. On the old account, there was no limit to the size of attachments that could be sent. This allowed the sales department to deal regularly with clients who had sample art that they wanted for their order. In addition, The Travis' company employed several artists who were also encouraged to send artwork via email. This meant that, when it was discovered that email with attachments were not going through, it was a very big deal.
Travis called Verio. He learned, much to his surprise, that Verio had a policy of an eight megabyte limit on email attachments. This was, in effect, a downgrade of company's email service. Frustrated, Travis began at first to insist a change be made based on the fact that he was never informed this would happen. The representative responded that this was a matter of policy and that changing the size limit for one client meant changing it for all clients. Travis demanded to speak to someone with more authority and expertise on the subject. The representative agreed to do so, putting Travis on hold. Travis stayed on hold for twenty minutes, and to this day believes that he was left on hold as an attempt to get him to hang up. When the rep returned to the phone, Travis expected some kind of explanation or solution. Instead, he was told that there was no way he could be helped. The service rep insisted that he had put Travis on hold for so long because he had been trying to talk to his Verio's own IT department, but could not get a hold of them. The rep suggested an upgrade to a dedicated private server, a machine over which Travis would have total control.
Travis was getting angry. He had already pushed for a new service once and wasn't about to do it again. He demanded to speak to a supervisor immediately. After a brief wait, a new voice came on the phone. Travis laid out his complaints, starting with the administration page issues, the email, and finally, the wait time on hold. He emphasized the changes Verio made without his permission, and that he considered the new email policy an unacceptable downgrade of service. The supervisor told Travis bluntly that the service that had allowed the old account unlimited email size was being phased out. This meant that Travis' company would have had to have switched over eventually, regardless of the email situation. Further, the supervisor went on, Travis really had only two options left to him: upgrade to a dedicated server, or go to another hosting company. Verio was not going to change how they do things just for him. Travis was shocked by the audacity of the man's statements, but in the end all he could really do was hang up.
In the aftermath of the Verio incident, Travis' position at his company has become more precarious than before. Through innocent slips of the tongue and whispered coworker intelligence, Travis has learned that his employers secretly blamed him for their online troubles. After all, the reasoning goes, Travis was the one who championed the upgrade. True, he was never in favor of returning to Verio for the new service, but these are details that are often ignored or forgotten in the heat of the moment. Regardless of the ultimate fairness of it, however, Travis now finds himself in a weakened position. He is able to deliver the results, but is also regarded with suspicion.
It turns out, Travis' experience with Verio is far from unique. Indeed, it may even be tame. Postings to epinions.com have yielded such colorful statements as “cheap, but more expensive in terms of pain than you will ever want to pay”. Another post is titled “An Obituary: The Death Of Service”. Of the whole list, only a few reviewers dare to give the company more than three stars out of five, most giving only one or two. In addition alienating their clientele, Verio also seems to occasionally engage in questionable practices. In 2000, Joanna Glasman wrote an article for Wired Magazine in which Register.com filed a lawsuit against Verio for using its services to create “massive lists of new customers and deluged them with unsolicited marketing messages”. In other words, spam. This specter of spam was raised again in 2005 by yet another unsatisfied customer at Complaints.com. In this post, she writes of how Verio's anti-spam methods didn't work, and Verio's customer support ignored her attempts at contact, allowing her business to be flooded with spam. Travis was able to confirm a sudden increase of spam as well. A Google search of “Verio complaints” only adds to the pile.
It has been said that the Internet and the changes it has brought are akin to the Wild West. That is, growth, innovation, and dynamic change at the cost of ethics, security and sometimes even basic trust. For every web service that clients view as solid gold, there are a few that turn out to simply be fool's gold in disguise. With nothing to go on but prices, features, and possibly planted reviews, the old adage “Buyer Beware” still applies. A statement to which Travis would add, “...of Verio.”
