We’ve been hosted at HostGator for a couple of years now, and have had a good experience with them until last night.
Last night, HostGator made as-yet-undisclosed, and unannounced, security changes to their servers. During this period, they put up ‘Under Maintenance’ signs across all hosted sites. For us, this lasted from about 3:00am-4:00am. Problematically, these signs were not ‘nocached’. Therefore, some visitors are still seeing these pages instead of the current content.
Far more troubling is what occurred to the databases during that time. We started getting database errors around 1:30, and one table even crashed. At that point, we ran a repair command, which was successful. So far, so good. Then, from 3-4am, the ‘Under Maintenance’ signs were put up. Also not really a problem, since no database modifications could be made during that time.
When those ‘Under Maintenance’ signs were turned off, the site was functional again and I assumed we were good to go. We allowed members to continue signing up and making changes to their profiles. We made forum posts. I even did a fair amount of college-name hygiene, replacing less-common college names with their more common nicknames (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University ==> Virginia Tech).
This is where I become profoundly disappointed in HostGator: I awoke around noon (hey, I’m on spring break) to find that none of my changes had stuck. In fact, a whole bunch of forum posts that were made after the site came back online were deleted. Most problematically, college profile updates and new member accounts created in the few hours before and after the update were also deleted. From my perspective, there is no good excuse for this. Since HostGator was aggressive enough to replace our site’s content with “Under Maintenance” signs, all maintenance should have been completed while those signs were still up. The site became accessible, but then had its database rolled back to a version from approximately 5 hours prior. Whatever triggered them to do this, I do not know. What I do know is that they exhibited poor business practices last night.
For all of you who modified your profile last night from about 11pm Eastern to 6am (and there were surprisingly many of you), we apologize that your changes were lost.
Tags: downtime, hostgator, hosting, maintenance