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Showing posts from December, 2013

The outsourcing question

I run a web development business, and am always engaged in a question about how many of my supporting services should be contracted out or done myself. And for what I don't do myself, who I can trust to deliver that service reliably to my clients. And what to do when that service fails. This is not an academic debate this week for me. On Sunday, my server-hardware supplier failed me miserably. On Friday, I notified them of errors showing up in my log related to one of my disks (the one that held the database data and backup files). They diagnosed it as a controller issue and scheduled a replacement for Sunday early morning. So far so good. It took longer than they had expected, but it came back and seemed to check out on first report, so I thought we were done. It was Sunday morning and I wasn't going to dig too deep into what I thought was a responsible service providers' area of responsibility. On Sunday evening, Karin (my business associate at Blackfly) called me a