Around morning time on August 2, 2013 and sites across the world hosted on HostGator and BlueHost were down. In fact, some sites were having issues since August 1, 2013 as per HostGator’s forum update. This was a network wide downtime. A lot of the people affected were from HostGator and BlueHost. This is because many of both company’s servers for shared, VPS, reseller, and dedicated are located in their Provo Data Center.
For those who didn’t know, HostGator changed hands in late 2012 from Brent Oxley to EIG, a company that owns quite a few well known web hosts. Also, many of HostGators clients went through server migrations after being acquired by EIG. BlueHost had been acquired by EIG back in 2011. EIG, also known as Endurance International Group has many other web hosts that are under them.
The problem with this downtime is that it comes with a lot of backlash from the customers unhappy with what is constantly repeated as poor customer services and experiencing downtime more than usual. Of course, this is different from the fire that happened in summer of 2008, on the floors of HostGator containing dedicated servers that left those clients down for 3 days. As a side note, I can attest that at the time, Brent Oxley awarded a entire month of compensation to dedicated clients when asked as I was one of them.
While I did make my own response to one of HostGator’s threads on the August 2, 2013 downtime issue, and I could write a totally bias article, I’m going to share some of the reactions.
Here are some of the reactions to HostGator around the social network sites during this downtime.
(Image created and shared by Tim Patterson)
Even HostGator’s phone and Twitter support were so inundated with responses that they couldn’t offer those methods of contact for a bit.
@hgsupport my site is down again! This is getting ridiculous
— Laura Agar Wilson (@lauraagarwilson) August 2, 2013
is anyone else's @hostgator site down???? is this the 80th time in 6 months for you, too?? @HGSupport #monsters #hategator
— Lazy Travelers (@lazytravelers) August 2, 2013
Here are some of the reactions to BlueHost around the social network sites during this downtime.
Seems like @bluehost is better at responding to customers on Twitter, gives personal responses, rather than canned @hostgator responses
— Nicole Henderson (@NicoleHenderson) August 2, 2013
This is a huge hosting fail because it spans across several web hosts that have millions of websites hosted. In fact, in all the time I’ve been with HostGator, this is probably one of the worst network issues I have witnessed outside of the fire issue from years ago. And I’m not the only client who has noticed according to the reactions.
As for BlueHost, I am not sure how their history of downtime has been, but the responses in their social network handles are a little more positive than HostGator.
Most of the downtime I have known in the past from HostGator was due to using all data resources allotted, or minor server outages. Other than that, I’ve also been privy to hearing complaints about HostGator’s customer service.
As a side note, some clients that are hosted on managed WordPress solutions like WPEngine that have their nameservers (DNS) hosted with Dreamhost and BlueHost for their email may also be experiencing downtime.
The biggest takeaways from this ordeal are:
To the web host
- Try being more diligent with customer service and try to uphold your guarantees. If you say 99.9%, it better be really close.
- Frequent communication is key with customers, especially since many websites are in fact businesses.
- If you are noticing a frequent influx of negative feedback, then something is definitely wrong. Address the issue and find a solution immediately.
To the customer
- Don’t panic because your site will come back.
- You are entitled to answers, so if it takes writing a message on Facebook, tweeting on Twitter, writing an official customer support ticket, writing in the web host’s forums… do it.
- Be patient for network wide issues as that may take up to 12 hours to get everything back in order.
- Don’t be afraid to give feedback, but be courteous about it.
Were you affected by this hosting #fail? What was your response? Did you wait? Did you move? How long did it take until your site was were back up and running?
I was wondering what the heck was going on this morning! Even Justreteweet was down! Thanks for the heads up Nile.
So , this was the reason why i was unable to open JustRetweet …One cannot really predict when servers can go down ..Anyways,thanks for sharing the updates and information .
-Pramod
If they were hosted on any of the web hosts under EIG, then it may have been the reason why you may have not been able to access JustRetweet.
Great Work……….. I was wondering what the heck was going on this morning! Even Justreteweet was down! Thanks for the heads up Nile.
Nile, I believe the gator is overhyped. They have a reputation for bad customer service and an inhuman face. If downtime is added, then, you need to consider changing your host. What do you think?
Hi Terungwa! That is not correct… HostGator is not over-hyped and the bad service started about 6 months ago when they moved their customers from their Texas datacenter to Utah… mostly out of the reason because that datacenter was bought by someone else and the original owner sold it.
i have very badly experience. my all site in blue host and that all are down. now any one please suggest which are best hosting.
Hiren- I use HostGator. I am not moving because of this incident. It happens once in a while. My only hope is that both hosts learn from this issue as well as the company over them.
yes almost all ther servers were bad. My website was also unavailable. And that really irritates every blogger.
I was wondering what the heck was going on this morning! Even Justreteweet was down! Thanks for the heads up….
I’m on bluehost and still experiencing intermittent downtime and 1995-style slowness on my website. I was rolling out an online marketing campaign this week so not having my website or email resulted in a huge waste of time and money. Bluehost was very responsive to customers but the problem is that 99% of their responses were the same canned comments on twitter. Worst of all, they would promise a fix was in place on an hourly basis and then nothing would come back up. They were setting expectations that they didn’t know they could meet. That is bad customer service. That is a basic customer service.
I feel bad for the customer-facing service employees because I’ve been there. I’ve worked phone jobs where there was a widespread issue and I was the person on the phone getting berated even though I did not cause the problem and could not fix it. It’s part of the job in customer service but I know it sucks. I feel less bad for the PR people manning social media. It’s not as rough posting tweets as it is having an angry person on a live phone call. You have to sit there and take it until they hang up. Then you get another call with the exact same issue.
The problem seems to be a technical one where EIG failed to have proper redundancy in place. That’s not a service issue, that is a cost issue and a management problem. I guess I have a limited right to complain because I chose a web host based on price rather than value, something I always caution people against when hiring a lawyer. I saw a lot of positive reviews so I thought I was getting low cost at scale but apparently I bought low cost for low quality.
And the redundancy would have made hosting more expensive. I had this conversation with a lot of people yesterday and eventually that came up from some of the other web hosts not under the EIG umbrella. In fact, it would have been a significantly high price and a lot of people are looking for affordable hosting, especially since many bloggers are bootstrapping their business.
I left HostGator very recently. They let me know in advance that they will be ‘upgrading’ their servers, which’ll mean that things would only get better…..well I assumed anyway!
They did the ‘upgrade’ and after that it was just problem after problem. I kept emailing them and using their live chat system and they kept making out that it was an issue on my side, even though I changed nothing and everything went wrong after they changed things. I made it very clear to them that the problem was on their side and it was because of their apparent upgrade. I was left without access to my email for 2 weeks and my website was down for a week. Truly unacceptable.
Will never go back, especially when there are a lot better companies out there.
Hi Sam! My server is upgraded and is better than it use to be. This is an incident that happens very rarely. Like I said, prior to this, the last issue I ever had with HostGator was back in 2008.
The problem with customer support is a week tier 1 group. Word of advice… if you aren’t happy with tier 1 (the first people that will respond), then ask to escalate the ticket to someone more knowledgeable, like tier 2 or tier 3.
Nile,
I seem to remember briefly having difficulty accessing my site that is hosted at BlueHost. I have found that company totally available and helpful with web site issues. This downtime fiasco is a reminder that if you have several different web sites, it is a good idea to use a few different hosting services. I didn’t know that hostgator and Blue Host are now owned by the same company, though.
Warmly,
Dr. Erica
The downtime is the difficult time of Bloggers. Most of the sites lost their rankings due to this issue. It takes nearly 2-3 weeks to recover the rankings of the site. most of websites lost nearly 40% of organic traffic due to this downtime.
HI Ajay! My site was up and down on Friday, but I did not lose traffic. I actually gained it.
I also faced the same problem as my Hosting is from Hostgator but I didn’t knew bluehost customers also faced the same problem.Really it was a big loss for me as I lost too many visitors that day but thank god now everything is back to normal and I would expect this not to happen again !
Hi Nile,
I was confused at first because my blog would keep going up and down and I thought it was an isolated issue. But at least I did what you said – I didn’t panic! I went over to Facebook (which is almost impossible to get into these days because it’s so unstable) and saw a post from Kim about the issue. At that point I knew it was just a matter of time and I didn’t even try to reach out to HostGator on social media because I knew they would be overwhelmed.
I want to take a minute to say something that most people don’t think about. When we have a self-hosted blog we sometime have a false sense of security because technically we “own” own content. In a sense that’s true but people should keep in mind that unless they have the server where their blog is hosted, sitting in their living room we are all at the mercy of our web hosts. When they go down we all go down right along with them. Of course 99% of the time most of us don’t have to worry, but it’s that one percent that causes people to panic and over react.
All of my sites were affected by the outage, I am a Hostgator customer. And to tell you the truth I am not all that upset about it, its technology after all and that happens. But I think EIG could have handled it better. And I hope that this will motivate them to create some sort of redundant system to prevent such a widespread outage in the future.
Hi,
Very nice article, thank you.
This was one of the worst hosting downtime ever, I lost of all my rankings temporarily and incurred a huge loss.. Gonna switch to a dedicated server soon.
Luckily for me, my stuff is on UK based data servers. I’ve had all kinds of issues with them in the past, and I’ve thought about moving to Hostgator but the thing that stops me is the fact that if I can’t get my guys on the phone or via social media, I’m 2 hours away from sitting on their doorstep to find out the problem.
For a lot of people August is a slow month, and having your website down can be a pain, but you have options – you can move to another host, you can ride it out or you can gripe. I like that you’ve shared such a balanced post here with us.
I am happy with my VPS 😀
Don’t know much about hostgator but i am using ipage and it is really disappointing, their customer support is really poor.
I have hosting with Bluehost, and my sites were down for over 16 hours. I have since moved my most important business site to managed hosting with Synthesis, and I’m looking for a better shared hosting solution for the others. I used to be happy with Bluehost, but in the last 6-8 months I’m getting downtime and incredibly slow load times several times each day. Just not acceptable any more. . .
All of my sites were affected by the outage, I am a Hostgator customer. And to tell you the truth I am not all that upset about it, its technology after all and that happens.This was one of the worst hosting downtime ever, I lost of all my rankings temporarily and incurred a huge loss.
Hi Nile,
I have been with Hostgator since 2010. Everything was OK. Almost perfect in every way. Any problem was solved fast and easy. Until this August.
My site was down for 2 days or more. Then it recovered slowly. Very slowly. Even today, at particular periods of the day, especially in the morning, I experience slow loading time and sometimes a Chrome error. Something like : “.. wasn’t able to connect to ….” .
I want to stay with Hostgator. I liked the way they helped me during all these three years. However, two weeks is a long time for a single site. I don’t know what to do.
I think I will wait a few more days then write an email to their support service.
Have a nice day
I have been using host gator for 10 years, there service was amazing when I started with them.
Sence them they have gone down hill alot. There service is poor and customer support … is so bad … its rather suprising what a difference it has been.
I wont recomend them any more.
Thank you for this nice article.
I am also using HostGator and it is great. Everything is perfect in every way. My website load very fast (0.881 Seconds).
That’s great that you’re having a great experience. I blogged about my own experience with them. They were great for me at one time, but lost my trust.
I wish you great uptime and a continued positive experience with them.