Update on Recent Outages

This week we ended up having quite the series of bad luck.

Things started off when the Name.com website went down twice due to a hardware failure. In both instances no customer sites were affected, only Name.com. Our Systems team worked swiftly to restore accessibility and both times they had Name.com back online in under 30 minutes. An accomplishment we have to say we’re pretty proud of.

Then, just when we thought we were in the clear, we experienced a separate hardware issue when a RAID controller failed on one of our shared hosting servers. This happened on Tuesday, September 21, at 12:15pm MDT (GMT-6). Unfortunately since this was a shared server, some customers experienced downtime.

Our Systems team worked through the night trying to restore the service. When plans A, B, and C failed, we finally had to move on to plan X. Thankfully we have backup servers for these “just in case” type of situations and no customer data was lost during this outage.

The vast majority of customer sites were back online by Wednesday, September 22, at 11am MDT (GMT-6), and any accounts still experiencing issues were personally contacted and updated until they were restored.

We understand the serious nature of this outage and that for some customers this meant their businesses were offline. To all of the customers that experienced downtime, we sincerely apologize. You trust us to keep your sites up and running, and in this instance we failed you.

While there was nothing we could have done to prevent this particular hardware failure, we have learned a great deal about how we can improve our response time and restoration process. Our team is critically evaluating everything that happened to see if we can prevent outages like this in the future. We are also taking steps to ensure that if we ever get hit with bad luck like this again, we can be quicker and more efficient at restoring your services. After all, time is money and your time is just as important to us as it is to you.

Again, we apologize for the events that occurred this week. We will be sending an email out to all affected customers explaining everything that happened and compensating each account for the time their service was down. This is the least we can do for the inconveniences caused by this situation.

Everyone’s patience and support during the past couple of days has really been fantastic, and we thank you. Further proof that our customers are, in fact, the best. 🙂