The 'little guy' dilemma;

When you rely on core services for you to be able to provide a solid and reliable service, can you afford to put your reputation on the line to support another small company?

I recently found myself pondering what I coined 'the little guy dilemma'.

I am not usually one to hound someone about mistakes they've made, errors in judgement or the like. I find it counter productive and fruitless, which is why I'd like to headline this article with the intention of deliberately not mentioning a particular service provider.

For the last four months we've been expanding rapidly, both in clients and staff through a lot of hard work paying off. During this stage in the company's pubescence we rely heavily on our infrastructure to aid us in both getting the job done and maintaining a reputation with oir clients as being quite firmly grounded.

Unfortunately for us we've had a number of issues with our email, DNS and domain registrar;all core and mission critical to our business.

When our email started to play up we were dumbfounded as to why we'd receive some emails and not others until we discovered it was because our storage limits were 100mb each. Admittedly we might have saved ourselves some trouble had we read the fine print, but I challenge you to find a business on similar package that can survive on only 100mb of storage. For me that's about 30 e-mails; of which I receive in an hour.

We eventually setup a combination of gmail and self hosted mail, without a single hickup.

To give it a grace period we cancelled our email shortly afterwards, specifically noting not to cancel anything else, like our DNS, which of course they did.

This left me at 6pm on a Friday night to try and work out why clients were complaining about services being down. They couldn't email me either;that was down too. After an hour and a half of ad hoc detective work (through barely any help from the company) it turns out we'd been stripped back to mere domain registration. Great!

Being a small startup that's expanding rapidly I quite torn, as I feel an alligance to other smaller companies over the large black dog of the corporate world. However, when it comes to core services are we as other 'little guys' best off paying three times as much fir basic levels if service and accountability?

It makes me wonder, what do clients think of us?