We moved to Namecheap from Hostgator a month ago. We moved because the ‘new’ servers provided by HG had been running very slowly and were causing our websites to go off-line. Not good for business. Not good for our readers.
Today, we find all Hostgator servers in the Provo datacenter and ll Bluehost servers hosted in the same datacenter and all Hostmonster servers hosted in -wait for it – the same datacenter have gone on vacation. Yep, the servers are on strike. The hardware has spoke and told EIG to bugger off.
Digging into the ashes of what was the excellent web host provider Hostgator, we have discovered that HostGator has been migrating websites to new ‘upgraded’ servers because Hostgator does not own its own servers and Hostgator’s parent company, EIG, wants to save money.
Until the EIG buyout, Hostgator leased servers from IBM. IBM managed the servers and Hostgator was effectively the world’s biggest reseller. When EIG took over Hostgator, EIG chose to migrate clients from IBM owned servers to Bluehost owned servers. EIG owns Bluehost and around 40 other hosting companies.
Now the proverbial muck has hit the fan. What lot of muck and what a very powerful fan it has hit.
@hostgator you guys used to be good. Now I keep getting outages every few weeks from you guys. This is unacceptable. What about redundancy?!
— nathancoyne (@nathancoyne) August 2, 2013
I switched to @hostgator for better service & my site is down again. Time to look for a new host again?
— Jennifer Bruce (@TheSimplePen) August 2, 2013
@hostgator 200 client websites down all day so far. Hostgator is destroying my small hosting business.
— PA (@PA25790860) August 2, 2013
Businesses have not had access to their emails, their websites or their Internet customers since the servers went down.
We moved to Namecheap (affiliate link) and are very happy with the service and speed of our sites. If you use Hostgator or any of the EIG owned server providers, we recommend you send a message to EIG by moving to a new host.
More commentary on the Hostgator outage here.
The Hostgator exodus trend stats can be viewed here.