Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Recovering From The Endurance International HostGator Outage Disaster

Since Friday, August 2, 2012, I have been seeing the blue reptile on the left all over the Internet, including my blogs and websites.

That blue reptile is the image that represents the HostGator webhosters.

On Friday HostGator experienced the worst meltdown in its history, along with its parent company, Endurance International's other hosting entities, Bluehost, HostMonster and Just Host.

HostGator has several hundred thousand customers hosting a lot of websites. HostGator going into failure mode caused a lot of panic around the planet. For a lot of people having their webhost go down is like someone randomly slamming shut the door to ones business.

It is very frustrating.

HostGator and Endurance International seemed to handle the disaster well, keeping customers updated via Twitter, Facebook and a Disaster Response website Endurance put on the Internet, using, I assume, someone else's servers.

The latest post on Endurance's Disaster Response website's final paragraph....

I sincerely apologize for any outages and negative impact you may have experienced. For many of you, an online presence is the lifeblood of your business – we take this responsibility seriously. We are committed to providing you with the high-quality, reliable service that you’ve come to expect and deserve. We value our relationship and the role we play in helping your business succeed.

Ron LaSalvia – COO, Endurance International

Well, I sure am glad the COO sincerely apologized, rather than insincerely apologize. With the COO saying his company takes the responsibility seriously regarding the negative impact caused by the outages I can not help but wonder why then there is no mention made of how customers are to be compensated for the loss of services for which they pre-paid.

My previously webhost, IX Webhosting, had a money back guarantee deal if they had a problem. When a problem occurred with IX Webhosting I would submit a support ticket requesting compensation for the downtime. This would always result in one month being added to the billing cycle, which was quarterly. Over the course of my time with IX Webhosting I think my compensation requests pushed back the billing cycle by at least 6 months.

With HostGator I am really not feeling I need some sort of compensation. Since the meltdown I'm guessing the amount of revenue the HostGator ads have generated on my blogs and websites has more than made up for whatever revenue I lost during the meltdown.

I hope this recent nightmare was a fluke, never to be repeated. I really do not want to go through, again, the hassle of moving my websites to a new host....

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