On the official website, Jeremy Wright once again announces drastic server issues for the burgeoning blog network. Regular readers of the Blog Herald or Problogger will have first-hand experience of these nagging outages which have been a feature of the network for some months.

Jeremy writes: “To be honest, it’s no longer load issues. In fact, the several experts we’ve brought in to have a look are stumped. And the server center says there is ‘nothing wrong’ with the box, even though it’s throwing scads of errors, MySQL keeps dying, one server refuses to talk to another, etc, etc, etc.”

In a recent interview I raised the view that server issues could be a problem for Syntagma Media within six months. In fact it’s probably the most important thing to get right if you’re running a professional service that people come to rely on.

However, it is possible to beat yourself up unnecessarily over this. Trying to log on to the website of British Telecom, the main UK telco, to pay a bill is often like climbing a Himalayan mountain — and that’s just to give them money.

Jeremy concludes: “So, we are looking for another server company to go with. We’d likely be looking at 3 servers initially. We don’t need a lot of support, but we DO need the servers properly configured initially, and we DO need them to stay up. Ideally all 3 would also be on the same switch, or close to it, since they’ll be talking to each other pretty heavily.”

If anyone knows a good server company, email him here: jeremy (AT) b5media (DOT) com.