After host network failure, we’re back from the dead

Our home page yesterday.

Just a quick note to say sorry for the site being down almost all of yesterday. We noticed the site stopped loading in the morning and it didn’t return until the wee hours of last night.

Here’s what happened: Our server host, Hostgator, experienced a network outage at one of their data centers that took down thousands of sites across the web (here are the latest details if you’re so inclined). It was their problem, which meant we couldn’t do anything but sit back, wait, and hope they could fix it quickly.

We’ve had our share of server issues over the past nine years; but things have stabilized a lot recently thanks to the help of our phenomenal system/server admin, Ryan Aslett. We have a dedicated server at Hostgator which we devote a fair amount of cash to each month, so we expect it to be reliable. While a tiny bit of downtime is just part of doing business on the web and is somewhat expected, an entire day is rare and quite disruptive.

Now we’ll sort things out with Hostgator and make sure everything is where it should be now that the lights are back on.

Before we get back to our regularly scheduled programming, we thought you’d enjoy the fun tweets some of our friends shared yesterday as the hours of outage dragged on and on and on…

We appreciate all your emails about the outage and your recommendations for new hosting providers. And thanks for hanging in there and finding some humor in what was a very frustrating day.

Jonathan Maus (Publisher/Editor)

Jonathan Maus (Publisher/Editor)

Founder of BikePortland (in 2005). Father of three. North Portlander. Basketball lover. Car owner and driver. If you have questions or feedback about this site or my work, feel free to contact me at @jonathan_maus on Twitter, via email at maus.jonathan@gmail.com, or phone/text at 503-706-8804. Also, if you read and appreciate this site, please become a supporter.

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Nick
Nick
9 years ago

Time to enter the cloud!

Bryan Hance
9 years ago

I think it’s time to move your hosting to downtown PDX man 🙂 Tons of good hosting options here in Portland and when something breaks, at least you can bike over and yell at someone …

Joe
Joe
9 years ago

yup host local bro 🙂 I see the route hops and it wasn’t cloud but a host failure at DC.. im I.T savy BTW.. glad its back up.. 🙂

Joe
Joe
9 years ago

PDX needs more colos it would provide work for ppl like me too, but some of the major compaines outsource data farms, like over seas 🙁 sorry got on a tech rant.. lol

Spiffy
Spiffy
9 years ago

I had serious F5 anxiety all day waiting for the site to come back up…

Joe
Joe
9 years ago

haha F5 best..

Paul Cone
Paul Cone
9 years ago

CanvasHost.com