This year doesn’t seem to be going well for EIG brands Hostgator and Bluehost who are experiencing yet another outage following the April 16th outage, and their New Years Eve one. HostGator first began reporting the outage on their forum at 2:40 a.m. As of 1:22PM EST Bluehost tweeted that “traffic is back to normal & services restored. We’re still monitoring & reinforcing our network”. HostGator’s last update came at 10:40AM on their forums stating they are still working on restoring all services.
According to the Bluehost site, the HostGator forum, twitter support feeds and twitter users, the service has been down for somewhere around 10+ hours. According to a recent update from the EIG media contact the outage is now only affecting a small portion of its customer base. It’s unclear how many sites were affected throughout the network interruption as a whole.
UPDATE 5/20/2014 10:55AM EST: So it seems that both Bluehost and HostGator are reporting the outage to be fully fixed; however the Bluehost support channel on twitter is still filled with customers having issues accessing their sites following this recent outage. While some of these current issues might have nothing to do with the outage – I just wanted to keep everyone up-to-date.
I have been a very loyal customer of Hosgator and have been them for almost 6 years now. Ever since the company was taken over some EIG group, I have faced nothing but problems and downtimes. The first outage that cost me huge amount, was in the month of August last year. It should have been a warning bell for me, but I neglected and thought things do happen with all web hosting companies. I tried to be patient and urged my customers to be patient as well.
But I believe, my trust and patience in Hostgator was a wrong decision. The 2nd outage happened again around new year eve and this raised my concern more over Hostgator’s quality of network and servers. It was my biggest mistake not to learn from my past experience and I did not have any backups. I repented and promised myself this time, not to be a lazy moron and trust Hostgator anymore, and was just wating for my websites to come up. Although the outage was not as large as compared to the one in August, but it was a clear signal to me, if I stay with these guys, I am likely to lose all my business.
The moment websites were up, I grabbed their backups and downloaded them to my machine. Now was the time, to start hunting for a new host and my major concern was to stay away from any such company which is a part of EIG group. The wiki link ofcourse helped me to reconize all the companies owned by EIG : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group
When trying to search in Google, all the review websites that came up were recommending Hostgator, Bluehost, Justhost etc. To my suprise, further digging around several forums and discussion blogs, I came to know that all such websites were affiliates of such companies and get paid to rank them high with positive review. Ofcourse, I was not aware of this fact and I am sure most of us who search for reliable web hosting for our business are not aware about the shady truth behind such websites. Another thing that I realised was, as compared to such web hosting rating and review websites, there are other community forums where people share their actual and honest reviews. Such discussion forums, lead you to introducing to a large group of other web hosting companies that could be far better in services, network and support. To name a few, there is http://www.webhostingtalk.com
After researching and going through all reviews and webhost company history, I shortlisted a few of the web hosting companies that I found to be promising and moreover not a part of EIG group. Just incase if anyone is looking for such shortlist, the my findings may help :
http://www.rshosting.com
http://www.site5.com
http://www.heartinternet.com
http://www.knownhost.com
I opened 2 different accounts with http://www.rshosting.com and http://www.site5.com and my only intention was to test their servers, network and support. Both of them offer money back guarantee and this assured me to cancel services with them, had things not gone better.
It was in the beginning of Feb 2014 that I had opened account with above two companies, and found them to be far better than Hostgator (my previous company). I was still skeptical about changing my web hosting after being with Hostgator for so many years, but this time, I had my data already ready with other two companies.
And the day arrived again.. April 16th 2014. My websites were down again, and this time, had I not taken preventive measures, my clients could have sued me and killed me. But thanks to previous downtimes for Hostgator, this time I was prepared and simply changed my nameservers to point to that of rshosting.com. Its not even a month, I came to know Hostgator guys were again having nettwork issue yesterday i.e on 19th of May, and I belive it is time for me to bid them goodbye. I am in process of cancelling my account with them, and at the moment havve my accounts resolving from rshosting.
Since Feb 2014, I have been using them and have not received even a single downtime with them. Since April, I have all my websites working from their network and do not mind recommending them for their quality of web hosting and support.
I am off the Hostgator ship now, and thought to share my experience with my new found hosts which might help others to prevent downtime with Hostgator (which I believe may happen anytime soon now).
PS : If anyone needs detailed history of all downtimes since Hostgator was acquired by EIG, then the best place would be to visit http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/yet-another-bluehost-hostgator-outage
Absolutely amazing write-up. Very detailed. Thank you. Do you mind if I re-publish this as a guest post service review? I would love to try to get this post some more attention because honestly, I couldn’t have said things better myself.