For the past few days we have seen a flood of complaints about Syskay. Personally I have called all those (who I know) that know the founder, no one is aware of anything and no one has concrete info as to what happened or when this will end. This is like a knockout punch to the Nigerian webhosting industry that has suffered a lot of smaller blows.

First I have to say I am in no way linked to Syskay (I have no sites hosted with them) but below are suggestions as to the way forward.

Most of you are middlemen between Syskay and your clients so while you may understand to an extent the crisis going on, your clients are as clueless as the response they get when they check their site now and jam a "page not found" response from their browsers.

Every day lost in this crisis is money lost for you and your clients, reputation lost too. But really you can't just seat there and watch things go bad without some damage control.

Syskay is not a host service provider with a bad record, what has happened to them today could happen to anyone or any other firm (in and out of this country). I'm not here to preach Syskay or any other company, I just want to give you helpful suggestions for damage control.


Leave Syskay out of this and face your clients now, compose very honest and sincere mails to them apologising for the unavoidable problem and then let them know the plans you are making. Give them timeframes for these plans.

Now to the plan (the way forward).

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If the following conditions are true for you then the solution below the conditions will work for you.
1. You have domain management access and can change nameservers
2. You have a backup of your site somewhere else

If these two options are true for you then simply purchase webhosting somewhere else and point your domain's nameservers to it.
Once propagation is complete, upload your site's backup and your site's life is almost back to normal.

Once Syskay is back online you can decide to switch back to them. If I was in your position I would strongly consider going back to them once they are back online depending on how they explain what led to this issue and what they have put in place to avoid its recurrence.

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If you find your self in the following situation below:
1. You do not have access to the domain management and cannot make any changes
2. You you made no backup

You can only keep praying and hoping Syskay comes back while you start conditioning your clients' minds to be thinking of a new domain name to continue business with.
If you have already sent Syskay a mail dont bother sending any more mails, you can imagine what their mailbox and support tickets list would look like now.

But please (biko, ejor, abeg), learn to register your domains on your own (with an ICANN accredited domain registrar...dem plenty) before hosting anywhere... don't let greed blind your eyes and prevent you from seeing beyond the free domain offer by hosts (there is nothing like a free domain, the cost for domain registration is neatly embedded into the cost you pay for the hosting package but we know you hate to be told the truth especially when it involves how you are to spend money so we tell you something you want to hear...something that is neither the truth nor a lie).

Please always take backups of your sites at least once a week, its as easy as loggin into your cPanel account and clicking the "Backup" button. Backups always seem like a waste of time but you'll never know when your investment in the time you spend backing up will pay off (it almost always pays off at some point in life).

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For the Syskay customers who are on the shallow side of the sea and are still afloat, I don't need to emphasize the need for you to start taking preventive steps now in the event that Syskay doesn't come back early enough before their next server/collocation lease due dates and then the datacenter starts pulling the plug (I personally hope this does not happen, infact I wake up hoping to see a "syskay is back" thread here).


So guys, sorry for the problems you are having now but please be there for your clients and always put them in the communication loop so they know just what's happening.

Others with more tips are free to share, please keep your adverts and offers away from this thread... just share tips that will help.

Aii,
DC i appreciate your concern and help on this syskay issue.
Having it in mind that your coy even hosts...yet u never mentioned diverting syskay clients to your side. I bow to your understanding of how business works.

meanwhile, there's this other angle u did not cover in ur tips... what if a domain is expired and needs to be renewed via syskay.
Am sure there's no solution to that. lolz.
Your opinion though.

Well if the domain has expired already, you're right there's no immediate solution to that except you hack Syskay's domain management account (no do am o, I no follow :-P )

If the domain has expired and the WHOIS expiration date is showing a date in the past you can just give the domain some 4 months (lol) and its back into the open market. That's a far fetched solution as I don't think Syskay will be down for that long.

My respect to the Oga's.
This is a more matured way of helping out.
Kudos to Dual core.

Dual Core: For the past few days we have seen a flood of complaints about Syskay. Personally I have called all those (who I know) that know the founder, no one is aware of anything and no one has concrete info as to what happened or when this will end. This is like a knockout punch to the Nigerian webhosting industry that has suffered a lot of smaller blows....

Good advice, I guess they're facing some challenges & felt so bad for them.

We were able to get some access to their failed server to transfer clients out (appeared to be DNS problem) but on deep thought and conversation with few people (I am considering ending this offer). I will update this thread once I confirm clients can restore their sites without migrating (I smell the possibility).

I left those guys since...

Thumbs up DualCore. Wish you re nearby so I can buy you a drink for this.

I was able to log in to my domain management dashboard few minutes ago and from there, I can easily change nameservers whenever I want to. Hence, I think everyone hosting with Syskay should be able to do that.

@Dual Core, thats more like it. A mature approach .

I already commented as to the bad taste of the other adverts where people are trying to move Syskay's clients immediately without looking at all the angles.

Someone above has confirmed they can change name-servers so they now have options to move to whatever hosts they want whether permanently or temporarily.

Well done.

DualCore,

Nice one mate.

Despite running your own hosting coy, you never for ONCE mentioned helping transfer Syskay's customers to yours.

You clearly understand the nature of the job, knowing fully well that machines are bound to fail anytime.

This is the best approach I've seen on this board as regards the syskay wahala

Kudos

Case closed

Syskay is back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All my websites are online now. Check yours!

Only one of my affected sites is working. One of them is opening on my BB phone but cant open on my Lappy. I dont understand. I have used different explorer. same thing.