At about midnight tonight, I got a pingdom alert that WeddingChicks.com was down again. This is at least the third time this week that our dedicated server has gone down. I’m more than just a little frustrated about it, so I’ve decided to write this post. In the past few months, we’ve had an increasing number of outages at more and more frequent intervals. We’ve had servers shut down without notice. We’ve designed a multiple server, scalable environment together with InMotion that was disconnected because they’ve decided that they don’t want us to run servers like that anymore. This not only makes our clients look bad, but it makes us look bad for recommending this hosting provider. Sadly, on Friday I decided to recommend to our client to move hosts (we’re moving to wpengine if anyone’s looking for a more reliable WordPress host). Below you’ll find a sample of other customers that were effected by this particular outage.
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Seems like service outages have happened more and more often these days. This time it seems to have started about 10 hours ago as reported by Karl and rippled throughout the network.
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When I tried to restart apache via cPanel, I couldn’t reach the server. I can’t SSH in. Worst of all, InMotion’s site is down so their live chat support channel was inaccessible. Luckily I have them on speed dial because this has been such a common occurence lately. I dialed in and talked to support right away. They told me that they’re experiencing network wide problems (duh) and they’re working on it, but unfortunately couldn’t give an ETA for when things would be back up.
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It looks like we’re not the only one who’s been frustrated by the frequent unexplained outages.
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I just got pingdom notification (12:48am) that our site has come back online. Hopefully the rest of these folks websites are coming back too.
Honestly, I want to love InMotion Hosting so much. I know some folks who work there on a personal level. They’re big supporters of WordPress and WordCamps, hell, they’ve sponsored our WordCamp in Orange County for two years in a row now. We’ve got multiple clients hosting dedicated servers with them based on our recommendation. Unfortunately, I just can’t continue to recommend their hosting service with a clear conscience. I would love to hear what’s going on at InMotion that’s causing these failures. If anyone has any more information about why their hosting service has gotten so flaky, I’d love to hear it.
Do you host with InMotion Hosting? If not, where do you host your site?
