Plenty to Talk About

Well, it's been a while and there's definitely no shortage of stuff to talk about. How about I fill you in on the events of last weekend?

Larry, a friend of mine who runs the business side of G3 Worship Music, called me from Florida Friday morning frantic that their web host abruptly dropped their account and stated in an email that they would not be reinstated. Their website (and email) is a lifeline not only to their business, but also to 2,000+ plus churches who rely on downloading sheet music, split tracks, drum loops, etc. Larry had been disappointed with this company's lackluster service and support for a while, but had no compelling reason to go through the pain of switching web hosts... until now.

Larry now wanted to bring the website in-house so I arranged for one of his employees to meet me at a CompUSA locally in the Dallas/Fort Worth area to go shopping. 45 minutes later, we walked out of the door with the following server configuration for a very nice $2,100:

3Ghz Pentium 4 PC
200GB 7200 RPM SATA drive
2 GB RAM
Windows 2003 Small Business Server with Exchange
Symantec Corporate Antivirus with Groupware and Spam protection
90 minute APC UPS
Netgear VPN Firewall

Incidentally, the guy who was an great help at CompUSA asked what business the equipment was for. When we told him it was for a supplier of church worship resources, he told us that he was a pastor of a church plant in Irving called Refuge Fellowship. Thanks for the help Brian and many blessings on your ministry!

All in all it took me a day-and-a-half to get the server and email setup. The static IP addresses were allocated by Friday afternoon (cBeyond did good considering they were busy with incidents from Hurricane Rita), the nameservers were routed back to Network Solutions within hours, and by Noon on Saturday, all 'A' and 'MX' records were pointing to the new server. Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, the web team of Rob Herman and Aaron McClung were able to get the website fully functional again and this past week was spent making sure that redundancy and backups were in place.

Oh, the reason why G3's former web host suspended their account was for repeated complaints of spam. Upon further research I was able to find out that G3 used Microsoft's List Builder service to send mass emails to customers and (surprise, surprise) many of the List Builder servers are on some pretty influential blacklists. I guess we'll be rethinking that strategy too.