Grasshopper Virtual Phone System Down for 30+ Hours | Hacker News Reader

Grasshopper Virtual Phone System Down for 30+ Hours

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29 pointshunterowens20 comments

From the Grasshopper blog:

Unfortunately, our efforts are being slowed by a few complicating factors:

1. We are running in our disaster recovery site and this is not a normal practice for us – this is leading to some unforeseen issues.

2. We are experiencing internal network issues at our disaster recovery site.

This really has the smell of a disaster recovery plan that was never adequately tested.

Moments like these define companies. Communications with clients and the recovery plan (do we offer a mea culpa package? et cetera) will be the company's turning point.

according to https://support.grasshopper.com/index.php?_m=news&_a=vie... they say: "We are still waiting on our primary storage array."

This companies infrastructure is such that the failure of a single storage array shuts them down? Tragic.

Not the first time people were p'oed: http://www.bnet.com/blog/smb/how-i-infuriated-customers-by-a...

Grasshopper CEO had to leave microconf due to an emergency before speaking earlier this week. I'm curious if this is related.

Hope they figure it out. we use them and have been down all day.

We use grasshopper but have scaled to the point where this (and many other things about grasshopper) aren't acceptable. What are some other good options? Thoughts on ringcentral?

I guess the first one that comes to mind would be Twilio.

Yup, Twilio + OpenVBX is pretty nice.

I don't have any affiliation. other than a direct customer relationship, but I use flowroute dot com for wholesale SIP termination.

EDIT: I should probably mention that we run freeswitch[1] on a 4 yr old box on our LAN.

[1] freeswitch.org

We use five9, but they have downtime as well (they are hosted call center, not SIP). Super easy to use, expensive.

Tried to get a quote from liveops, but they literally won't call back. Terrible sales staff.

we're looking at: http://www.2600hz.com/

RingCentral is pretty solid. The web interface is bad but the service itself is solid, good feature set and reliability.

Disclosure: I work at Phonebooth.

I'd encourage you to check out Phonebooth.com. We have our own network and are well positioned to meet most SMB business phone needs.

If you are looking to make the jump, email us at marketing@phonebooth.com and we'll be able to work something out for you to make an easy switch.

Thanks, Chris Moody

Disclosure #2: I work at Phonebooth and this is not some clever ploy.

Lesson for businesses: for any service that's "mission critical" (communications would be for most I would think) either have a tested backup plan of your own or be VERY comfortable that your vendor does.

The Grasshopper guys have given me great service over the years. It's unfortunate that this has happened, but I'm sure they'll make things right when they have time to breathe.

We swapped over to ringio.com, which has been a great so far.

Before or after this outage?

What's disappointing is they didn't notify users.

if you are mostly mobile (laptops and smartphones) then Line2 is a good choice. Its also the least expensive.

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