Internet is the place to be right now and having a website / domain name is no more a fashion statement but a necessity. Many businesses now have their own websites on the web and even a minor downtime can lead to loss of revenue for some of these businesses.
In such a scenario, shutting of a webhosting company can lead to catastrophic impacts. Customers of Webhosting company UCVHost are feeling these impacts right now. The Delhi based company recently ceased its operations completely and shut down. This has led to loss of Business data and continuity for the companies that were using its services.
Started by Rajat Khanna in the year 2000-01, the company UCVHost provided services like website hosting, domain registration and web based application development. Now, the company has stopped working completely and its website says that its servers have been taken over by Softlayer, an IBM company. According to the website of UCVHost, clients should contact the company Softlayer for any queries as they were providing the back-end support to UCVHost.
However, surprisingly the data of Softlayer servers is deleted and not available to anyone.
This means that all the data that the clients of UCVHost might have collected over a period of time is all lost. The importance of data is known to all and this indeed is a big loss to the companies that could not preserve it.
The customers are in angst as they were never informed about this and thus could not create alternatives in time.
As per SoftLayer-
“At the request of Rajat Khanna, the services provided to UCVHost were terminated effective October 16. Pursuant to SoftLayer policy, the data on those servers were automatically deleted shortly thereafter and are no longer available. If you paid for services provided by UCVHost, please direct all questions and concerns directly to Rajat Khanna…”
IBM too has simply washed its hands off the whole debacle and thus clients have nowhere to go. UCVHost was hosting data for around 1200 clients and now these clients are trying to find Rajat Khanna so that they can know what is happening.
Even the 18 employees of the company are in a state of shock as they are all now out of jobs and searching for new ones. According to an employee, “We were never informed of the company’s decision to close down. We were told we will get our dues in three-four days, but we have got nothing till now.”
This is a very poor situation and gives way to numerous questions. As per Business Line, market analysts suggest that such cases are on the rise in India as the companies are unable to cope up with the scaling.
This is not a good sign for a growing country like India as now the clients of UCVHost will never trust a startup and would like to invest only in bigger brands.
So, if you are looking at hosting a website, make sure that you host it with a reputable organization with a good track record!
Yes, its very unfortunate. The rising cost of Rs. against US $ have vanished the margins in web hosting for providers who resell server outside India. Also Companies like these operate on low margins and dont do value addition in their offering.
Completely agree with you guys.. This kind of irresponsibility gives a bad name to all the new startups or even smaller companies in general.
That’s indeed a crazy set of events. That’s one of the reasons I prefer to host with reputed hosts and also ensure I’m keeping regular backups.
Unfortunately, many people don’t bother with backups because they are not sure how to do that and many a time designers don’t bother telling them.
I would call this behavior inhumane.