It was another holiday where Haverhill City Hall is closed—and another holiday where the city’s website is kaput.
Residents Monday found they were unable to pay water bills and excise taxes and were unable to gain access to the Haverhill City Council agenda for Tuesday. Similarly, the city’s website at www.ci.haverhill.ma.us was also down for more than 24 hours around Patriot’s Day. The site remained down as of 11 a.m., Tuesday.
“All the city servers are working fine. It is a problem outside the city. We are looking into it and working on a solution with our vendors,” Haverhill Mayor James J. Fiorentini told WHAV by email.
In April, officials blamed the city’s Internet service provider for the Patriot’s Day problem and said they might look for a new vendor.
“There was a technical issue with the host that supports our website,” said Haverhill Finance Director Andrew Vanni, who also serves as head of the city’s Internet technology (IT) department. He identified GreenNet as the provider. GreenNet’s voice mail indicates the company is owned by Nelson Valverde, who also operates Invalsa Coffee and Valverde Coffee Roasters of Salisbury.
Vanni added, “There’s nothing we can do. We might be looking for a new firm going forward.”
The Da*m City website is finally up and running. It only took until this afternoon to get it started. Any business other than the City would be OUT OF BUSINESS by now. And given the problems encountered, if Greennet couldn’t give assurances that this wouldn’t happen again, they would and should have been GONE after the first time this happened.
WE the citizenry are the city’s customers, and yet we are ignored and disregarded; but the City still want’s its money when due. Go figure!!!!! Not a very good advertisement for GREENNET I would say, nor for The City of Haverhill because the town fathers continue to employ these losers. Must be a friend of or related to someone at City Hall.
This is squarely the fault of the blowhard mayor. Who else can you blame? In past the city had two IT Directors….one for the city side of government and one for the school side. The people holding those jobs both retired over the past couple of years and Jimmy Failure has yet to fill those positions. What I don’t know is if the city funds them and the mayor uses that money for other purposes….my guess is that’s exactly what he’s doing.
Haverhill is in the dark ages in all thing tech in regard to IT and schools. Since we send one of our kids outside of district, we can get up to date records of our kids progress instantly. We can even set up an alert in case of poor performance (say sub-90% in our case) on any single test/quiz/project as soon as it’s entered (usually within hours), sent straight to our email.
Each Haverhill school page is different from the other. One school may be updated, while others are completely out of date. It’s entirely up to individual teachers whether or not to use their own pages for their own classroom, some do, some don’t, and due to the union agreement, none of them have to either – so kudos to the individual teachers that do.
Their website is a disaster and there’s nothing on file with MA SoS.
*Greennet
The hostname isn’t resolving to an IP address so the problem is most likely at greennet.net in West Newbury as they are the provider for haverhill.ma.us. Their listed nameservers are not responding so they have probably crashed or taken offline.
Its almost as sad as the five second traffic light by the courthouse. The heads of Haverhill at city hall are falling the people on so many levels.
Or the traffic light from Water st Turning left to go over the bridge……horrible management.
Three possibilities: 1) There must be something on the council agenda the mayor doesn’t want people to see, 2) maybe a coffee roaster is not the best option for a web host (no bid, friend-of-the-mayor contract, no doubt) and/or 3) the Hale debt excuse will be dragged out to say the city couldn’t afford to properly put up a website.