Bluehost, HostMonster, and HostGator customers were without their websites for a short period on Friday.
Those three hosting providers are owned by Endurance International Group. The outage appears to have occurred when server maintenance took longer than expected in a Provo, Utah data center.
On the Bluehost and HostMonter Twitter accounts, it was revealed that server maintenance didn’t go as expected and caused additional delays.
After websites began crashing, Bluehost and HostMonster customer service reps were overwhelmed by phone support requests.
HostGator took its customer support one step further, adding a dedicated support forum thread do provide customers with updated status information.
While major host downtimes are not unheard of, they typically involves DOS (Denial of Service) attacks and successful hacking attempts. Bad weather near major server farms has also been known to cause issues. In one case early this year, the hacktivist group Anonymous took credit for crashing GoDaddy services through an exploited DNS attack .
Did you experience any Bluehost, HostMonster, or HostGator outages today?