The May Holiday and Hosting in China
China has 3 long holiday seasons each year each lasting a week . The May First holiday (五一, Labor Day) , the October First holiday (十一, National Day) and the Chinese New Year (春节) that falls between the month of January and February (determined by the lunar calendar).
One of the thing we are very concerned about is the effect of these long holiday season on the service respond level at our datacenter. Most people go on extended leave during this period although there are still people on duty 24hours in the data center.
This week was the May Holiday and we decided to take this opportunity do a little stress’ test on the data centers where we have our servers located. To make things a little more challenging, we did our surprise in the wee hour of the morning.
The results are some what satisfactory except for one worrying incident.
At one of the data center, we were not able to reach the technician on duty after repeated calls. The next day I called up the supervisor and he apologized explaining that the technician had fallen asleep as he was the lone person on duty over the holiday.
Upon further enquiries about how he is going to ensure that similar incident does not happen, he turned hostile and asked me if I wanted to take things down that road.
Sensing I had pressed a little too hard, I quickly took the position of trying to improve service.
While more and more datacenters are being built (mostly stated owned), the standard of data center in China still have miles to catch up in terms of service level.If you have server in China, surely you have similar story to share.
If you are planning to put a server in China, talk to us. You could be doing yourself a favor not having to deal with the frustration in a language that you barely understand.
Add comment May 4th, 2007