Inc.: They worked around the clock or slept on the floor, ate a stash of food, and watched the streets break out into chaos below.
But resilient Web hosting firm directNIC.com, a New Orleans branch of Intercosmos Media Group, kept much of Louisiana online at the height of Hurricane Katrina and through its aftermath.
Holed up on the 10th floor of a downtown office tower, directNIC, which hosts some 800,000 Web sites and is responsible for a further 1.2 million domain names, “didn’t lose service once during this entire disaster and has three weeks of backup power secured,” CEO Sigmund Solares said in a statement issued last week.
Solares thanked the firm’s customers for “overwhelming support and inquiries into our well-being.” None of the workers who stayed behind were injured, he said.
“We have people depending on us and we are not going to let them down,” Michael Barnett, the company’s crisis manager, wrote in his Web journal last week.
Barnett said they were also running out of fuel for the generator, but risked being “robbed and killed” in the streets trying to replenish supplies. “It’s that bad,” Barnett said in his blog about the breakdown in civil disorder last week, likening it to the Lord of the Flies.
Barnett called his boss, Solares, the most “organized, stockpiling human being on earth, and we all love him for it.”
