Please Reconsider Cancellation
We understand that you wish to cancel because of your frustration with the downtime faced by you last week. Apps4Rent regrets the inconvenience caused to you. However, please listen to our side of the story and reconsider your decision about the cancellation.
Here are some reasons to continue to work with us:
- Apps4Rent has had only 2 significant downtimes in 17 years of business. The one last week was as a precautionary response to cyber-terrorism. The previous one in 2012 was due to a 100-year storm called Sandy which knocked out power and flooded facilities in downtown Manhattan, New York.
- Normally, our customer support team does an excellent job and is reachable by phone, email, and chat 24/7. Calls and chats are picked up in less than a minute and emails are responded to in 15 minutes. We have lived up to these service levels for years but currently are overwhelmed with support requests and request your patience for the next few days till we are back to our normal service levels.
- During the first two days of the ransomware attack, our priority was to direct all our resources towards assessing the impact of the cyber-attack, scanning all our infrastructure for any malware, protecting our customer data, and strengthening security. By concentrating on these, we started bringing back some of our customers online as early as Day 3. The process took longer because we had to create secure environments, sometimes from scratch, scan existing data with multiple tools, and then migrate the data back into applications, and test them.
- During the downtime, there was no way to meet each customer’s expectations about their specific hosting accounts, which may have led to disappointing or alarming our customers. We regret the lack of communication on the first two days but made a concerted effort to improve communications from Day 3 onwards by directly contacting our customers and sharing updates on Twitter. As we rarely have significant downtimes, this one swamped our chat, email, and phone queues so much that we could not respond quickly enough. We are already planning to improve our communication procedures going forward.
- Here at Apps4Rent and among our industry peers, infrastructure and security processes are designed around the assumption that there will no more than a few hours of downtime other than for maintenance activities. We are proud to have exceeded industry standards for many years. However, the last week’s attack was a ransomware attack, which companies much bigger than us in the hosting business or otherwise, have had difficulty dealing with. While Apps4Rent brought up almost all its affected customers in 3-6 days, other companies affected by ransomware have taken much longer, typically more than a week. See a few recent examples of ransomware attacks: Kaseya (Ongoing since July 1), Summit Hosting (2 weeks), INSYNQ (3 weeks), Swiss Cloud (3 weeks), IronOrbit (45 days), A2 Hosting (3 weeks) among others.
- Wherever you go, you may be exposed to Ransomware. The only companies that may have the resources and knowledge to protect against such attacks may be the biggest cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. If you wish to move to any of these, we can still serve you. We are an approved partner of these Cloud providers and can therefore provide you the reliability and security they provide along with our migration and support services. Our preference is Microsoft 365 and Azure, which suit customers who use Microsoft technologies the best.
- Your favorite Managed Service Provider may not be able to save you. The Cyber-criminals who are behind variants of ransomware are sophisticated groups. Now they specialize in Supply Chain attacks, meaning they have penetrated the software tools that MSPs use to serve their customers. See the latest Kaseya supply chain attack from the last week which has impacted thousands of companies. And Kaseya is a leader in that particular market segment serving MSPs and small businesses. Lesser-known competitors of Kaseya have been hit previously. Even bigger remote network monitoring tool companies such as SolarWinds that serve the US government and large corporations have been hit with supply chain attacks.
- If you wish to stay with Apps4Rent, but require greater protection of your data and uptime, we can offer you several solutions. To keep your data safer and under your control, we offer off-site backup capabilities for a little extra cost. Considering that we are significantly less expensive than our competitors, you will still come out safer and save money. We also can offer you security software such as Multi-Factor Authentication that protects your data, encryption, and endpoint management software services such as Microsoft Intune. Depending on your budget, we can create hot disaster recovery solutions and provide managed services on top. As you can see from the quick recovery from ransomware, we have experienced in-house cloud experts on our team to serve you. Please consult with our sales team and they can propose appropriate solutions based on your requirements.
- Normally, we are forced to bring servers down during off-hours to do maintenance involving implementing new security measures. The unavoidable downtime actually helped us accelerate the process that was ongoing for several weeks. We are also consulting with tool vendors and cybersecurity consulting companies to further improve our defenses. We are committed to investing in technology, services, and training to quickly improve protection and response to any future cyber-attacks.
Thanks for your patience and understanding. We appreciate your feedback and suggestions.