Jan Leow's Blog Page

Bluehost is down due to power outage

OMG! This is the worst case experience I have with the Bluehost webhosting service I had for years. It is probably unfortunate that Utah in USA had a power blackout. My main website domain has been down for several hours already. Fortunately my website setup is rather complicated as apart from my usual blogging on Wordpress I also setup blogging using Google's Blogger as well as other website like Yola, Bravenet, Google Site, Tumblr for experimentation. So some section of my website is still functioning. Strangely I don't know why the DNS was affected causing my other addon domain in IPserverone to go down as well. Which means all my forwarding email from that server would have ground to a halt!

It's been several hours already and my website on Bluehost is still down. Guess it is going to take longer before getting restored. I found out about Bluehost status from Twitter, so looks like Twitter is quite a good source of quick information. Much faster than news release to be search on Search Engines.

Finally Bluehost also made some announcement in their helpdesk website:


helpdesk.bluehost.com

The Bluehost Helpdesk is currently unavailable and will be back soon.

There is a complete power outage effecting one of the Bluehost data centers, expected ETA is roughly 1:00 AM Mountain Standard Time.

Provo Power has requested that we shut down power while the transformer is being replaced. They are allowing us to use UPS power for the phone system. The other data center is unaffected by this outage.

We apologize for any inconvenience.


Bluehost should consider setting up some kind of UPS as backup plan. Likewise in Malaysia where we often experience power blackout every once in awhile especially on a hot day where all the air-conditioner would be powered on at full blast, that put quite a strain on the power producers and usually very likely result in a power outage.

For mission critical task and services, a UPS power backup is a must. Hopefully Bluehost should consider implementing such UPS power backup as part of their overall webhosting strategy rather than letting their users in a lurch when such power outages happen.

Looks like I can't do anything to my main blog as well as several of my other website hosted on Bluehost including access to my cpanel control panel till the power outage is resolved in Utah.

[update]
Yes! My site is up and running again! Took a long while, the twitter updates from Bluehost says it is booting up their servers one by one and about 90% is onstream. Soon shall be 100%.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bluehost does have UPS power backups. The power company requesting they cut all pwoer including UPS for safety while the cfixed the transformer.

Patsy said...

I nearly had a heart attack when I checked my stats this morning and when I got my report for website outage. It was 2 hours!! I run an online halloween costume shop and this is the worst time to lose service. Imagine not even being able to use UPS..that is crazy!

Anonymous said...

Bluehost, Inc. does, in fact, have UPS backups that are capable of powering the servers for several hours without interruption. However, due to the nature of the damage done to the power grid in the vicinity, the power company demanded that EVERYTHING be turned off; There wasn't so much as a lamp in the parking lot turned on in all of East Bay during the power company's repairs.

Contrary to what you want to think, Bluehost, Inc. is far from ignorant when it comes to webhosting or server administration. Unfortunately the situation was beyond their control, and in the best interest of their hosting subscribers all power was cut to prevent any possible hardware damage or data loss.

Anonymous said...

It seems like every 3 to 4 months Bluehost has some major power outage or equipment failure. Each time this has happened, my sites are down for at least a day. After three years of this, I am moving on to a new hosting company as I am tired of explaining to my customers why our site keeps going dead. My sites are still down today as I type. Well off I go to surf the web to find a reliable company to host our sites.

Anonymous said...

check out hostdomainshere.com and thedotmail.com for reliable and affordable webhosting.

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