Q: What's the best way to ensure a sudden surge in business?

A: Arrange for a week of downtime to move your servers to a colocation facility.

We had been planning this move for a couple of months. Up until now, all of our production gear has been operating out of the "server room" in our offices, basically an oversized closet which contains a couple racks of equipment and our trade show booth. This was fine as a development-stage startup, and made it easy for the developers to get in there and tinker with the gear.

Now that our MCI and Covad contracts are simultaneously due for renewal, we decided that the time was ripe to move the production equipment into a grown-up facility. This would ensure things like:

* Backup power and standby generators, instead of cheap UPSs and a 15-amp circuit which popped every time we plugged the Centipede game into the wrong outlet.

* Climate control, instead of a room which was always too cold in the summer, and too hot in the winter.

* Security, with keycard access and video monitoring, instead of a room which anyone could get into by popping out a few ceiling tiles.

So, we scheduled the move for the first week in February. If everything went well, we figured, we could be moved and done in a few hours. We planned on a week just to be safe. Of course everything didn't go well, and the T1 lines into our rack at the new facility have yet to be turned up as of today. This doesn't effect our web site, as that will be seamlessly cut over once the server has been moved, but it does mean we can't do any revenue business.

When we were approaching the end of January, this didn't look like it would be a problem. Our plan was to do two projects during February, and we had one in the pipe where the customer understood our need to be down for a while. Since we promise two-week delivery, but we can get the projects done in just a few days, we figured we had plenty of wiggle room.

Then, the last day of January, another project dropped into the pipe, and the customer was in a rush. Can we push it back a week? Yes, but we need to start right after the move is done. Dodged a bullet.

Today, we had another project arrive, with the customer really in a rush. At this point, there's nothing we can do except hope, since the old T1 lines are down, and the new ones aren't up yet, but this client wants to begin right away.

Fabulous! we think, since that's three projects for February, well ahead of plan.

Uh-oh! we worry, since what are we going to do if the new T1 lines aren't up by the weekend?