Why Bluehost, HostGator, HostMonster And More Went Down Today… But We Didn’t

A Recap Of The August 2013 Bluehost Outage. HostGator and HostMonster Also Went Down.

According to website owners on all of the social media networks, Mashable and WHIR, three major website hosting carriers – Bluehost, HostGator, and HostMonster – are experiencing major outages today. Their resellers are likely also experiencing outages today, as well.

Sorry to hear if your website is down today, and hopefully it gets back online soon.

At the same time, we do think its important to understand the WHY behind the outages with all three of these major website hosts, instead of simply understanding that it IS happening.

Why Three Website Hosting Providers Had Outages Today

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To put it simply – because they all share the same carrier location. According to reports, the vulnerable data center in this outage is located in Provo, Utah, and owned by Ace Data Centers. The big issue here appears to be related to server maintenance.

See, while these three website hosting providers are all different in name, they share the same parent company – Endurance International Group – and the same data center to host their sites.

Unfortunately, because of that setup… when one goes down, they all go down.

According to the EIG Wikipedia listing, the company owns over 50 brands for website hosting, and a large number of their brands are some of the most trusted on the Internet. In addition to Bluehost, HostGator, and HostMonster, EIG also counts BlueDomino, Domain.com, Dotster, HostYourSite.com, Intuit Websites, IPOWER, and Xeran in its stable of hosting brands.

So it wouldn’t be a shock if your website is hosted by one of these brands, you could experience outages too.

How Netrepid’s Server Maintenance Systems Are Different

netrepid harrisburg pa data center

Note: to be fair to the folks at Ace Data Centers, we weren’t on location with them when the outage took place. However, the following paragraphs detail how our system for server maintenance is setup to avoid downtime like so many are experiencing today.

Unlike these EIG brands who are using an off-site carrier location to provide their website hosting, Netrepid owns its data center (located in Harrisburg, PA) and maintains complete control over its uptime and downtime. Therefore, things like this don’t affect our services at all.

When we perform server maintenance at Netrepid, we will typically:

  • Create a snapshot or a clone of a critical system and
  • Test the process before performing the live update.

We have the ability to test full system upgrades in a sandbox environment before any actual changes to production take place. Also, most of our systems are clustered, so we can upgrade one system at a time before moving to the next one. This way, everything stays online.

To prove a point: in a recent maintenance process, our team moved our entire VMware infrastructure from one room of our data center to another – during the day – with absolutely NO downtime to production systems.

Again, if your website is one of the many affected by today’s outages – we’re sorry to hear about your downtime. However, since you do have some downtime right now, we’d love to chat if you’re looking for a new solution for your website hosting.

Feel free to chat with us now, leave us a message, or contact us for more information. Hope your weekend is better than your Friday :)!

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