WestHost customers stand up and be counted. Is your site working? Mine is down as of 5:12 PM ET.

Our email isn't working and I just checked our site and it appears to be down too.

Ours is back up now.

My site appears to be down. I haven't been on very long... just over 3 months now. I wonder how frequently this is going to happen?

Very, very rarely. This is the first time it has happened for us and we have been with them for a bit over a year. Usually if the site is going to be down it if for planned maintenance and they send an email warning you of this. The planned stuff is also always at weird hours during the middle of the night.

Mine is back up now. I switched to them around January and this is the first outage of this type that I'm aware of.

This doesn't need to turn into a WestHost bashing. I just wanted to see if other people were affected.

Thanks.

Definitely not. We've been very happy with them. Especially now that all of their servers have been updated.

Wasn't trying to lead it into a bash session. I've been quite happy with the speed of wordpress on my westhost server... something I can't say the same for my last host.

Dear WestHost Client,

Yesterday, at approximately 2:00 p.m. MDT, we experienced a utility power failure at our Data center. As a result our UPS systems kicked in as they are supposed to. However, there was a power transfer failure with our second generator that did not automatically occur. At 2:37 p.m. UPS battery power ran out before we could get two generators properly brought online. By approx 3:15 p.m. we manually had both generators running and at full power. Total time without power was about 40 minutes. We are currently still running on generator power and will continue to do so until later this afternoon when UPS system batteries are fully charged and ready for us to complete a conversion back to utility power. Utility power was restored yesterday at 6:45 p.m. We have fuel on-site for our generators to run for several days so doing this is not a risk.

Once power was restored at approx 3:15 p.m. many of our systems were able to come online shortly after. However, there were a handful of systems that needed our attention to get them running again due to the abrupt power loss.

As you are probably aware this is the second power incident we have experienced in a short period. Given that it's only the second power incident in the history of our current Data center I can't emphasize enough the importance that is being placed on ensuring this doesn't happen again. Our Data center was designed with 100% uptime in mind and prior to these last incidents we have delivered on that.

I appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to resolve this. I appreciate the dedication of my team. They have put in a lot of extra time and effort to make sure clients are taken care of as quickly as possible.

Sincerely,

Chris Russell
CEO

I didn't get an e-mail Matt. Did you contact them during the outage(resulting in that reply)?

I contacted them during the outage and got the email too. Interesting!

To their credit, my experience with WestHost over the last 5 years has been solid. I can't remember one outage in that time. They also have a 99% uptime track record verified by host watchdogs, which is pretty cool. ( http://www.westhost.com/whyus.html )

Bum deal for sure, but I think yesterday was just that one percent!

-Leon

edit: interesting read for the tech-heads:

http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/graph?coll...amp;range=86400

Nope, that was just delivered to my mailbox like a regular announcement email.

With a few other people reporting an issue I figured it was a more widespread problem so I just let them work it out. No point in being person #9136 to report the same issue. Now if I was still down when I got home last night I would have been quite a bit more concerned and spent more time investigating it.

We got the email too, and didn't contact them during the outage.

Well I guess I need to speak up if I want an explanation next time. I agree with Matt... why report the problem if it seems rather widespread.

I'm newer to WestHost, so your more experienced opinion is helpful Leon.

Cool! No worries!

Btw- Thankfully, nothing was lost, emails still seemed to come through once back online.

However, I took this as a CLEAR sign to back up my entire site. There's been too much done to the site at this point to just lose it all. That would be a sad day.