Newswire – by DE BrownWebsites hosted at Endurance International Group (NASDAQ: EIGI) the corporate entity behind Bluehost, HostGator, iPage, FatCow, and other household internet hosting names suffered a major disruption of service, effecting tens of thousands of customers.
(Newswire.net — November 21, 2013) — Wednesday morning the internet went dark for tens of thousands of small businesses.
The Ace Data Center in Provo UT, a co-location facility owned and operated by Endurance International Group (NASDAQ: EIGI) was disrupted by failure of a high voltage power line. The failure shut down the websites of thousands of small businesses that have hosting accounts with Bluehost, HostGator, iPage, FatCow or other brands owned and operated by EIG.
According to one Customer Service Representative at Bluehost, the disruption took place “between the back-up generators, and the server racks, necessitating a physical re-wiring”. For reasons that are not fully understood, the back-up generators at the facility were in-effective in maintaining power supply to power the co-location facility.
It appears that BlueHost, for one, withheld information about the seriousness of the problem from its support representatives. As early as 8:46 am MDT, BlueHost began to acknowledge its problem via its twitter account https://twitter.com/bluehostsupport
“Hey Everyone, our data center is having a few issues that may affect some customer sites. NetOps is looking into it and we’ll update soon!”
By 12:05 pm MDT, HostGator reported that full service had been restored for the majority of its affected shared and VPS web
Despite the public comments to the contrary of some of the effected companies, notably BlueHost, and HostGator, the disruption of service to many of their customers continued without abatement for 7 hours. As of this writing, some 11 hours after the outage was first reported, many dedicated hosting customers still remain without service.
According to Chris Ryan from www.cancer.im the continuing disruption of service to his website “is economically devastating”. Ryan continued “I feel like I have been mislead at every juncture by BlueHost. For 10 hours now, they have been telling me my site would be back up in an hour. Now they are not even committing to any timeframe. We are flat out of business, and I don’t know when or if it will change.”
This is not the first time that the company has had major issues with the Provo Data Center. In April, 2013, a former employee of HostGator was arrested and charged with installing a backdoor, giving him control to more than 2,700 servers. Since beginning its dedicated hosting service and its acquisition by EIG, many BlueHost customers have reported sub-standard and unsatisfactory services. In August, 2013 customers in Ace Data Centers’ Provo, UT facility experienced an outage due to network issues.
Both EIG, and their subsidiary Ace Data Centers failed to return calls, or to answer emails in response to this story.
http://newswire.net/newsroom/financial/00078336-bluehost-service-out.html
Distance from Bluehost headquarters in Provo, Utah to NSA Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah: 26.7 miles
A connection? Remember this story?
Explains why From The Trenches was down yesterday.
Glad your back up and running again, Henry.
Glad your back Henry. A test maybe?
With all of todays sofisticated technology I would think that one of the so called experts would know exactly who or what caused this to happen. Heck, I could almost bet that this outage has been in the makeing for a while. Imagine all the hundreds of millions of $ that this outage caused. NSA probobly installed another back door to spy on us all, them bastards……….. Anyway, It sure is good to have FTTWR back up and running. I can`t wait for The Word today. 🙂
Henry, it’s good to know there was a logical reason From The Trenches was down yesterday (Wed. 11-20-13) because I honestly thought you were either hacked or shut down by Obamanation…Glad you are back up (and I guess you came up last night around 10 pm or so). And when I noticed Cryptogon also had issues I wondered if it wasn’t Bluehost, the webhost my old Something Happening Here site used to sit on, which I shut down because of crappy Bluehost service, among other reasons.
Thankfully it was short-lived.