(posted at 09:43PM BST) 
I always enjoy reading the drivel spouted by the companies who we supply or who supply us; for one thing, the technical inaccuracies can keep me chuckling for days on end.
One particular customer, who *doesn't* host with us (for reasons which will become clear later), makes a very big deal about the fact that they consider server uptime to be more important than anything else and their website discloses that they host some rather high-value e-commerce sites.
Maintaining a high server uptime is always a noble gesture and one which we try to assist them with whenever possible; the servers themselves are managed by us but physically hosted by a third party and if anything bad happens to these servers, we get the usual 'Help! Things are broken!' telephone calls and have to sort things out.
For the most part this worked well up until the third party hosting company decided to run their N+1 UPS subsystems to the point where the '+1' UPS was being used to support the day-to-day running of their datacentre; the problems started when a UPS failed and a cascade failure took out a significant part of their internal infrastructure as well as one redundant pair of servers belonging to this customer.
Once they got their UPS equipment fixed, the third party hosting company took this opportunity to *demand* the customer (and us) to physically relocate the hardware from their old datacentre to their new datacentre; upon which I discovered they had placed a breaker on this customers' power feed that would fuse at 5A with the customers' equipment total draw being 4.7A - yep, only 0.3A to go before everything goes buh-bye.
I expressed my concerns at the time and while they were acknowledged by the customer; as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing has been done about it as that is a contractual matter between them and the third party hosting company - so, I'm living comfortably in the knowledge that it is only a matter of time before there is a power outage at that new datacentre and the breaker blows its' fuse - as nothing pulls more amps than three Dell PowerEdge 1750 boxes spinning their fans at full speed on initial powerup.
I would like to add that the third party hosting company is not to blame here as they are supplying 5A and the customer is getting 5A; as far as our own co-lo customers goes, we provision 1A to standard 1U co-lo customers but their power outlet will trip out at 2A (double) to cater for powerup spikes and what-not but will protect their own equipment (and the rest of our customers!) by tripping when it really has to.
The moral of this story: "Don't spend inane amounts of time writing marketing guff, twattering on Twitter, writing pointless 'blog' entries and dedicating paragraphs of text to Google's latest ejaculation until you can get the fundamentals right first." | 
