When Your Host Gives You Lemons
Friday was an exhausting day.
The blogging community was in an absolute riot as many of us woke up to discover our websites were down. As Facebook and Twitter boards lit up, we were all asking “What the hell is going on?”
Completely in the dark, we could only turn to each other for educated guesses and solace.
So what do you do when the situation is out of your hands?
You make lemonade out of lemons. Or you at least go for a good laugh.
What Really Did Happen?
Hundreds if not thousands of bloggers on Bluehost, HostMonster, HostGator or JustHost experienced intermittent outages or were completely down on Friday. Endurance International Group is responsible for all four of these brands.
I don’t know what was more upsetting. The fact I couldn’t get through the customer hotline to my host or that they have yet to send out a personal communication explaining the problem. They haven’t even put out a press release out the issue! Instead, I had to find an article online directing me to an informational website.
If it’s any consolation, Endurance International Group did start a blog to update us. The irony of starting a blog to let bloggers know what was going on is not lost on me.
Endurance International Group wrote: “Our datacenter in Provo, Utah experienced an outage that impacted many of our Bluehost, HostGator, HostMonster and Just Host customers, causing intermittent connectivity to your sites and our internal support and phone systems throughout the day.
The problem occurred during routine server maintenance when a hardware failure quickly cascaded throughout the network. Our customer service teams, technicians, and engineers responded immediately.”
Was your site down on Friday? Were you one of the people tearing their hair out or were you wondering what all the fuss was about?
Cute & funny pictures <3 Glad your website is back up. I didn't have a problem with my host but I heard many were upset over it.
My site was down! Of course it went out right in the middle of me writing a post! My site was in and out all day.
my site was down as well. very frustrating! we just switched to blue host so i am hoping it is not a sign of things to come!
Funny pics! I luckily didn’t have any issues, but I know a lot of people did.
I am on the east coast and I woke up to all of this blowing up on Facebook!
My site was down most of the morning. But honestly by Friday afternoons in the summer, the site is pretty slow (quiet) anyway, so I took it as an opportunity to enjoy the weather and have some fun with the kids. I can say that I am fortunate that I did not have anything due or that needed to be done on Friday.
I had no intention of calling my host because I was guessing I would be on hold forever, and I’m sure they were telling everyone the same thing, that they were working on it.
If it was a Monday morning, it might have been a little different for me, but it wasn’t too much of a big deal. I too am disappointed about not getting any kind of e-mail or update from the host.
Glad you rolled with the punches. I was trying to keep calm but Friday is a huge traffic day for me :/ And while I do understand that things are going to happen, the lack of communication is inexcusable.
‘hardware failure’ huh? What’d they do? Drop a live chainsaw in there?
#StickingWithBlogger
LOL! I was wondering the same thing. How can one hardware failure cascade to the ENTIRE database?
Ugh… my site was down for hours on Friday. I’m not sure about your experience, but since I switched to bluehost in January this is the second time (that I know of) that this has happened and I head to twitter to figure out what is going on. I was so bummed too since NaBloPoMo had just started …
I try not to stress about it too much though because there wasn’t much I could do. My husband is in IT though and said they were idiots for doing their server maintenance in the middle of the day.
I understand that sites are going to go down… it’s just part of the biz. But the lack of communication was ridiculous.
BTW — They actually didn’t do their maintenance in the day. They did it at night and then all hell broke loose :/
Yes, and I was super irritated. Like how nicely I put that? That’s not really how it was. This was the second time in a few weeks…the first was when Hostgator moved my server…first it started running really slow, then it crashed altogether. And was down for a really long time. Honestly, I think I am moving.
Michelle, I think that’s putting it mildly! I’m guessing there were some expletives mixed in there!
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Yeah – I was down most of Friday. At first I thought I had been hacked – but when I googled for “why can’t I log into my website?” I found the answer! This was the first time it happened to me so far – I have HostGator – and I understand it had something to do with transferring of files also. Apparently my file had been transferred to some place in Utah that has a bad history for this type of problem. So, I am not a happy camper at this point because I am worried it might happen again, but wadda ya gonna do? I’m not ready to jump ship just yet. We’ll see.
I know. Accidents do happen but on this grand a scale? Considering what a serious player their parent company is, I think it’s going to be tough to find a web host that has the same customer service they generally have. When I moved to self-hosting, I really used their support team and they were wonderful.
Funny pictures! Fortunately, I haven’t had these problems yet. Thanks for the info!
This can be devastating…but once I get past completely freaking out I walk away and do something else, read, housework , whatever and hope by the time I return all will be returned to how it should be.
Kathy
http://gigglingtruckerswife.blogspot.com
I agree. I was freaked out but at the same time laughing at how we were all freaking out. 🙂
I can only imagine what you had to go through.. sorry to hear that you got it bad. But happy that everything worked out fine and things are up and running. Cute pictures by the way.. Hopping over from Michelle’s Party 🙂
That was all pretty crazy huh?
The same thing happened at Dream Host a couple of months ago. Very frustrating indeed! Thanks for linking up to Friendship Friday!