(Newswire.net — November 21, 2013) — Wednesday morning the internet went dark for tens of thousands of small businesses.
The Ace Data Center in Provo UT, a co-location facility owned and operated by Endurance International Group (NASDAQ: EIGI) was disrupted by failure of a high voltage power line. The failure shut down the websites of thousands of small businesses that have hosting accounts with Bluehost, HostGator, iPage, FatCow or other brands owned and operated by EIG.
According to one Customer Service Representative at Bluehost, the disruption took place “between the back-up generators, and the server racks, necessitating a physical re-wiring”. For reasons that are not fully understood, the back-up generators at the facility were in-effective in maintaining power supply to power the co-location facility.
It appears that BlueHost, for one, withheld information about the seriousness of the problem from its support representatives. As early as 8:46 am MDT, BlueHost began to acknowledge its problem via its twitter account https://twitter.com/bluehostsupport
“Hey Everyone, our data center is having a few issues that may affect some customer sites. NetOps is looking into it and we’ll update soon!”
By 12:05 pm MDT, HostGator reported that full service had been restored for the majority of its affected shared and VPS web
Despite the public comments to the contrary of some of the effected companies, notably BlueHost, and HostGator, the disruption of service to many of their customers continued without abatement for 7 hours. As of this writing, some 11 hours after the outage was first reported, many dedicated hosting customers still remain without service.
According to Chris Ryan from www.cancer.im the continuing disruption of service to his website “is economically devastating”. Ryan continued “I feel like I have been mislead at every juncture by BlueHost. For 10 hours now, they have been telling me my site would be back up in an hour. Now they are not even committing to any timeframe. We are flat out of business, and I don’t know when or if it will change.”
This is not the first time that the company has had major issues with the Provo Data Center. In April, 2013, a former employee of HostGator was arrested and charged with installing a backdoor, giving him control to more than 2,700 servers. Since beginning its dedicated hosting service and its acquision by EIG, many BlueHost customers have reported sub-standard and unsatisfactory services. In August, 2013 customers in Ace Data Centers’ Provo, UT facility experienced an outage due to network issues.
Both EIG, and their subsidiary Ace Data Centers failed to return calls, or to answer emails in response to this story.