Yesterday I decided to recirculate a message across the Rapid Purple social networks reminding people to always maintain a personal backup of your files – whether that be your website, your NAS, your file server, or even just your home computer. This morning I found a perfect example to share with everyone of just how important your own backups are – and how important choosing a reliable hosting company is.
It seems that as of 04-22-14 hosting provider Audefy.com has disappeared. That’s right – disappeared. No warning; no communication to its customers. Their servers all went offline and as I sit here writing this post (9am on 4/25/2014) there still haven’t been any updates from them.
UPDATE 4/26/2014: Audefy has suddenly reappeared; sadly with no notice or message to any of their current customers regarding these 60 hours of unknown downtime.
While we all hope this is merely a technical issue rather than a disappearing act – the deeper you dig into this the worst it starts to seem. Andrei from HetrixByte pulled up the web archive for the Audefy website – and unfortunately it didn’t look very promising. It seems the majority of support was provided via their online support desk – so assuming this is all related to a technical failure somewhere they wouldn’t have access to their support desk. There is an @live email address listed – however my own attempts to reach out have not received any responses.
If we look a bit deeper we can find Audefy’s owner on WebHostingTalk – sadly it seems he hasn’t made a post since the end of May 2013. However if we take a look at the last few posts from Audefy we can find out that they’re using servers based in the Netherlands and connected through the FiberRing network. FiberRing however isn’t showing any network outages right now.
If we run a traceroute on the test IP that Audefy used to provide we get the following:
C:\***\****>tracert 192.162.137.55
Tracing route to 192.162.137.55 over a maximum of 30 hops
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms Wireless_Broadband_Router.home [192.168.1.1]
2 4 ms 2 ms 3 ms L300.NYCMNY-VFTTP-252.verizon-gni.net [***.***.***.***]
3 9 ms 6 ms 7 ms G0-7-3-5.NYCMNY-LCR-22.verizon-gni.net [100.41.1
95.10]
4 19 ms 29 ms 77 ms ae4-0.NY5030-BB-RTR1.verizon-gni.net [130.81.163
.224]
5 11 ms 9 ms 9 ms 0.so-6-0-3.XT1.NYC4.ALTER.NET [152.63.17.85]
6 7 ms 9 ms 9 ms GigabitEthernet6-0-0.GW1.NYC4.ALTER.NET [152.63.
20.49]
7 6 ms 6 ms 6 ms teliasonera-gw.customer.alter.net [157.130.60.14
]
8 9 ms 20 ms 8 ms nyk-bb2-link.telia.net [80.91.254.15]
9 89 ms 88 ms 89 ms ldn-bb2-link.telia.net [213.248.65.93]
10 96 ms 97 ms 96 ms adm-bb4-link.telia.net [213.155.130.26]
11 91 ms 90 ms 90 ms adm-b3-link.telia.net [62.115.136.101]
12 128 ms 129 ms 126 ms leaseweb-ic-150724-adm-b3.c.telia.net [213.248.7
7.38]
13 126 ms 128 ms 126 ms te9-3.hv16.evo.leaseweb.net [95.211.171.227]
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.
So let’s head on over and see if LeaseWeb is reporting any network outages. Sadly they are not. They did have a few hiccups this month with their Netherland servers, however everything seems to have been resolved already.
As of right now, everything seems to point to a disappearing act – and for those Audefy customers who did not maintain a backup of their website this is all probably heart breaking right now. Trust me though we’ve all been there. Take it as a lesson to keep your own backups moving forward. Hopefully Audefy responds to at least their customers.