The real-time search results inGoogle say it all. WestHost’s blog on the other hand doesn’t say anything but their twitter feed shows all kinds of activity and hullabaloo.
According to reports, it appears as though the (popular amongst photographers) website hosting company WestHost encountered a problem with their fire extinguishing system.
(via westhost network status page) On Saturday, February 20 2010, at approximately 2:20 p.m. MST during an annual fire system inspection of our data center the fire suppression system was inadvertently triggered and discharged into the data center environment. The discharge of the fire system has affected the hardware and operations of our servers. Not all servers have been affected by the discharge. We are working to restore servers and services as quickly as possible. Due to the nature of this interruption we will be experiencing extended outages.
Ouch “Extended Outages” sounds ugly to me. There are actually quite a few DWF forum members effected by this outage and they are already discussing the outage in the DWF Pro Gear & Software Forum (login required). The good news is that according to WestHost most of their client information is going to be recovered.
Only time will tell if that is true but until then, if I had a WestHost site, I’d be checking every so often to make sure it’s up and running. That reminds me… I’m off to snag a fresh backup of my site. You know, just in case!
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10 Comments at "Got a WestHost Site?"
Yes, this is a strong reminder to download a backup copy of your site if at all possible…and you should do this on a regular basis. We count on hosts having backups, but you never know what could happen…like a fire suppression system going wonky.
Losing email for a couple days is one thing. Their feedback is that messages “may” trickle in over the next few days. But this is particularly tough when you have a shopping cart tied to your site, like I do. Not only were there no sales listed during the entire outage, westhost can’t tell me if data was collected or will show.
Backing up data is boring and that is why it falls through the cracks. We tell our clients to backup their database daily or they can use our DATASAFE service which does it for them — remotely. Our new browser based product, P1Wired, will include 2 different server sites to mitigate this potential issue. Cloud computing is a real breakthrough but needs to be “backup-ed” with redundancy.
I’ve been with Westhost for many years and am so upset that I am searching for a new service. I’m on day four of this outage and customers are still receiving error pages, I’m receiving no sales and my customers e-mails are being returned to them. The damage is incalculable.
Yes….I’m still without a site & email.
Westhost have just announced that they are providing a Westhost 4.0 account to use in the meantime. Basically good enough to leave a “I’ll be back” message.
I wonder how this will affect SEO for down sites?
[...] was reading Mark Lutz’s post this morning on the Digital Wedding Forum blog “Got a WestHost Site?” and it struck a cord. PhotoOne sent out an email to our clients last week on the same issue [...]
I am still waiting for West Host, my shopping cart with all of my galleries and also my online booking system is down so this is causing lots of problems and I am getting lots of emails from clients. My hostpapa website is also down – they said they are having a HVAC problem.
Progress made on the downed servers. Currently, 3 more Dedicated servers are back online, and we are providing more details on our server status page to keep everyone more in the loop of what is going on:
http://netstatus.westhost.com/
I’m up and running again!
My Pickpic site has been on a Westhost server for nearly a year. All that work is now down the drain. The site has been down for 8 days now, and apparently my data was on the backup servers that also crashed. The flip side of this is that I have a much better shopping cart from Collages, and it’s not hot and heavy in the middle of wedding season, so most of my galleries were expired anyway. Its really amazing to see the incompetence of this company. Makes you realize that there must be just a few people working there, without the resources or smarts to provide decent communication about this. I have not received an emailed bulletin update since Wednesday and all attempts to reach them hit a stone wall. Pickpic is going to a monthly system – $100 per month – so I had to look for new shopping cart software that really did a better job. So we are back online even though Westhost isn’t.
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