Bluehost goes down for the big one–9 hours on 08/02/13

Bluehost goes down for the big one, a 9 hour outage

I have used  Bluehost for my webhosting  for almost 2 years and during that time, I have never experienced any downtime.  This ended on the 2nd of August when Bluehost took a major outage that lasted the entire day.  My two main sites were both offline for over 8 hours but when Bluehost finally got things fixed, I experienced no data loss that I could tell.  Overall I have to give Bluehost  a “F” on this situation.  Their non-ability to handle this size of an outage became quite clear.

What was interesting was that Bluehost’s main site, www.bluehost.com was also down and they were not answering their phones.  The phone part may have been because they were overloaded with calls, but they should have been able to have at least a recording, so that callers knew they knew something was going on.  Instead they tweeted all day long about possible fixes and when things might be fixed. As I am not a member of the tweeting generation, I did find this a bit distracting, but I guess it’s just how things work now.

I never did hear if Blue Host was hacked or not, but for my sites, the total downtime came to over 9 hours.  There was no loss of information on my sites and I did not have to bring up a site backup.  What seems interesting is how no communication from Blue Host was ever generated.  I received no email notice, or phone calls, even a a recorded phone call.  This is the normal way a company should handle a total outage that take them down 100%, so much so that their main website is down also.  Please don’t just respond via Twitter, that is a very non professional way of doing business.   Twitter is used by a younger-me now generation and I don’t believe it’s a very professional way to handle a business i.e. your only way to communication to the outside world for over 9 hours. 

My websites are my e-commerce venue for selling both my photography, and my printing services.  Taking a 9 hour downtime without any proactive communication from my hosting company is not what I expected.  I have used Bluehost’s technical support several times in the past and not had any issues.  However in regards to this outage, it’s given me enough concern that I am again looking for a hosting company and most likely will move my business.