Your Hosting Company can ruin your day

Today something happened to me that made me realize just how dependent I (and anyone else who makes their living on the internet) am on the whims of others. It just so happens that over the past few days my Hosting Company's been migrating their unix hosting servers over to new IP numbers. Most of thesse migrations seem to have been fairly painless. However, today at 07:00 this morning my website vanished from the internet (which was fine and totally expected).

By 09:00, though, when I entered my site's URL (www.celtnet.org.uk) int a browser to check if it was back up I was instantly re-directed to another site entirely. My heart began to beat faster as I feared the worst — had my site been hijacked? Half an hour later and my site's URL seemed to be pointing to another site entirely. Obviously something was completely amiss.

Immediately I dashed-off an email to the people at LCN (my hosting company) enquiring as to what was going on and why my site seemed to be pointing at other people. About an hour after my email was sent, at 10:30 they updated their information page to day that, unlike the previous day's IP address moves today's migration was progressing much slower and it might take 24 hours for the problems to resolve!

Soon after I received a response to my email, with an apology and a link to the updated information page (which I'd already seen). Not very helpful, admittedly — but probably fair enough. By now, in addition, a request for www.celtnet.org.uk was pointing at the name of the machine whose IP address was being moved: oldraq8.lcn.com which simply displayed a 'Server not Found' message. Well, at least my URL wasn't directing people to someone else's site any more. Of course, by now, the next consquence of all this was striking me. Fore each hour that my site remained off-line I was actively losing money!

Indeed, Wednesday is one of my stronger days and on a typical Wednesday I can expect to take-in more than the ~$220 that my hosting plan with LCN costs for an entire year. Essentially in this one day's outage (assuming that it's only going to be a day) I'll lose enough money to have otherwise paid for a year's hosting. Then there's also the general loss of credibility that the site's unavailability causes. Especially as the URL was directing people to a random website and a 'Server not Found' error.

Basically today's looking to me like being a complete disaster. It's now 14:40 — over seven hours since the site first went down and I've taken pen and paper to go and write this missive. I've also realized that though I'll be able to write this up in my Blog no-one will be able to read it as the blog's hosted on my main site — which is down.

It's now 16:20 and my URL's finally pointing at my side, though the site iself is still not available and I'm getting a 'connection timed out' message. It's an improvement, but still not as good as actually having my site available. Indeed, it's 22:30 now and still no sign of the site being back up. I'll set-up a system to ping the site so tiat if it comes back sometime tonight I'll know when. It now seems likely that this is going to impact Google's crawl tonight — a really bad thing after all the hard work I've been doing in terms of getting my site into Google's index.

Finally! It's 10:15 the following day and my site's back up. I can now upload this blog and get on with some work on the site.

Please don't read this as me getting at LCN. Whilst I've been them the've been a great Hosting Company. The tale is here to show just how dependent websites are on other people and how something very small can have a severe effect on a site-owner's bottom line.