Some of you may have noticed that Sedfast has been down a little lately and I wanted to keep you guys informed as to why. It was down for 11 hours today, down for an entire day last week, and down for a several hours a week before that.
All of these problems were because of various and supposedly unrelated hardware problems at our hosting company (Bluehost), and have thus been completely outside of our control. When Bluehost goes down, all we can do is wait until it comes back up.
You can imagine how unhappy I am with them, since when the server we're on goes down, not only does Sedfast go down, but many of my own business sites (including all three of my blogs including the Blackdragon Blog) go down as well. I've screamed at them and Bluehost has credited me some of the money they're charging me for hosting, but obviously that doesn't help us any.
I would like to switch hosting companies but because of the sheer amount of sites, domain names, databases, etc I have on our virtual server, it would be a tremendous hassle and a real financial expense for us. And, since Bluehost is among the "best" hosting companies out there (historically Bluehost was the company everyone went to when their hosting companies (like 1and1 et. al.) kept crashing) it's very likely that if I went with another hosting company we'd eventually have another outage, which would have made the entire move a useless exercise.
Therefore at the moment I am not changing companies and I'm going to hope that Bluehost has gotten their act together. Because of the system-wide crash they had last week they lost a ton of business and got shitload of bad press, so hopefully that will spur them to action. (Last week's outage was system-wide; today's problem was hardware just on our VPS server.)
Bluehost has been a very good company for the past three years prior to all of this recent crap. (They were recently purchased by an equity firm so that may explain some of these changes.)
That being said, if we have one more outage from Bluehost any time soon that lasts longer than about an hour, then I will probably bite the bullet and switch companies. But not until/unless that happens. Fingers crossed.
So if you go to Sedfast (or any of my other hosted sites) any time soon and the site doesn't load, just know that it's fucking Bluehost again. Just wait a few hours and it will be back (and likely I'll be dumping them).
Remember that, at any time, you can go to www.masf20.com to check the status of this site if you ever have trouble accessing it. I usually update the Blackdragon Twitter and Facebook feeds also.
I'm sure many of you are going to recommend hosting companies you use and say "Use mine! I've never had a problem with them!". You're welcome to give recommendations, but just remember that I have no intention of switching companies (yet!) because of the huge hassle and expense it would involve.
Thank you all for your patience. Hopefully the worst is behind us. Just wanted to let you know that I'm on top of this.
All of these problems were because of various and supposedly unrelated hardware problems at our hosting company (Bluehost), and have thus been completely outside of our control. When Bluehost goes down, all we can do is wait until it comes back up.
You can imagine how unhappy I am with them, since when the server we're on goes down, not only does Sedfast go down, but many of my own business sites (including all three of my blogs including the Blackdragon Blog) go down as well. I've screamed at them and Bluehost has credited me some of the money they're charging me for hosting, but obviously that doesn't help us any.
I would like to switch hosting companies but because of the sheer amount of sites, domain names, databases, etc I have on our virtual server, it would be a tremendous hassle and a real financial expense for us. And, since Bluehost is among the "best" hosting companies out there (historically Bluehost was the company everyone went to when their hosting companies (like 1and1 et. al.) kept crashing) it's very likely that if I went with another hosting company we'd eventually have another outage, which would have made the entire move a useless exercise.
Therefore at the moment I am not changing companies and I'm going to hope that Bluehost has gotten their act together. Because of the system-wide crash they had last week they lost a ton of business and got shitload of bad press, so hopefully that will spur them to action. (Last week's outage was system-wide; today's problem was hardware just on our VPS server.)
Bluehost has been a very good company for the past three years prior to all of this recent crap. (They were recently purchased by an equity firm so that may explain some of these changes.)
That being said, if we have one more outage from Bluehost any time soon that lasts longer than about an hour, then I will probably bite the bullet and switch companies. But not until/unless that happens. Fingers crossed.
So if you go to Sedfast (or any of my other hosted sites) any time soon and the site doesn't load, just know that it's fucking Bluehost again. Just wait a few hours and it will be back (and likely I'll be dumping them).
Remember that, at any time, you can go to www.masf20.com to check the status of this site if you ever have trouble accessing it. I usually update the Blackdragon Twitter and Facebook feeds also.
I'm sure many of you are going to recommend hosting companies you use and say "Use mine! I've never had a problem with them!". You're welcome to give recommendations, but just remember that I have no intention of switching companies (yet!) because of the huge hassle and expense it would involve.
Thank you all for your patience. Hopefully the worst is behind us. Just wanted to let you know that I'm on top of this.
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