“My website is down! Can you fix it?”
The answer is, it depends.
Long story short, this morning there was an Internet outage in Silicon Valley. Our Silicon Valley datacenter provider an update immediately:
We are currently experiencing a partial outage. Our network engineers are actively working with our upstream providers to restore connectivity as quickly as possible. 2023-05-25 17:15:00 (17:15 is Zulu time (Greenwich England) which translates to 11:15 Mountain Time)
So, while the Wild Iris Marketing and AlphaPixel servers are fine, the Internet in a portion of California was broken. In fact, much larger companies like Shopify, Facebook, Indeed, Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox and The Sims(!) are all getting hurt by it, so our clients are not alone. Can we fix that? Unlike Bob The Builder, no we can’t. Because we’re website people not fix-California’s-Internet people.
Many websites became briefly unreachable this morning. Some have since become reachable and then unreachable, and then reachable again. But our servers are up and running without an issue.
Long-term, while glitches like this are an inconvenience, we don’t usually advise clients to assume the extra costs of having duplicate servers in different parts of the country to ensure this can’t happen. For as infrequently as this happens, it’s most cost-effective to just deal with the occasional problem. In the event you need 24x7x365 uptime, we do have the ability to provision more sophisticated distributed hosting with redundancy and load balancing across multiple regions of the country, the world, or even across multiple providers like Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services.
Our clients certainly weren’t the only one affected. You can always look at websites like Downdetector.com to see if your site is having the issue or if it is a larger problem. The vast majority of the time if you use reliable hosting in a solid datacenter, it is a bigger issue happening elsewhere.
We use Virtual Private Servers from multiple providers, in multiple datacenters across the US in Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle, Silicon Valley and Chicago to ensure we always have operating servers somewhere, no matter what local disaster occurrs. We maintain website backups of each individual website and the entire webserver both on-site in the datacenter and offsite in our premises to make sure your data is safe and close at hand if something goes wrong. We have a team of experts with decades of experience available on call at almost any hour to solve problems.
The advantage you have when working with us is if you notice an issue and call or text us, we can immediately see what the problem is and, in the rare case it is our issue, we fix it. If it is not our server we monitor the issue and do what we can to mitigate the issue and get things working for you. To be honest, if you call other places like Go Daddy, Host Gator or others, you will sit on hold for ages ad then not get any real information or help after all.
As one client said today, “Knowing you have things under control and I do not have to spend my time or brainpower dealing with this is worth every penny I spend on hosting with you!”
Our website hosting isn’t the least expensive available. But in the long run, it costs you less because we keep you online and you don’t have to worry about problems.