Comments on: Got a WestHost Site?

By: wendy woods

wendy woods — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:32:55 +0000

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.

By: Mitchell Wong Ho

Mitchell Wong Ho — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:39:20 +0000

I’m up and running again!

By: Lance

Lance — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:07:09 +0000

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/

By: Erica

Erica — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:53:46 +0000

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.

By: Belt-and-Suspenders | A Blog For Portrait, Wedding & Lifestyle Photographers | PhotoOne Software

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:36:30 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Mitchell Wong Ho

Mitchell Wong Ho — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:34:53 +0000

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?

By: Mary Clement-Hill

Mary Clement-Hill — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:22:46 +0000

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.

By: Doug MacFaddin

Doug MacFaddin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:19:30 +0000

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.

By: Tamara Lackey

Tamara Lackey — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:07:14 +0000

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.

By: Michael Mowbray

Michael Mowbray — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:49:05 +0000

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.