Hardly a week goes by that there isn’t a notable outage of one sort or another in the IT business. But some — like the one experienced by Endurance International Group yesterday — are more notable than others.
Endurance International Group is one of the world’s largest hosting companies, and specifically the parent company of the “stack ’em deep and sell ’em cheap” hosting brands Bluehost, Hostmonster, Hostgator and Just Host (as well as a plethora of others), with only one of them honest enough to put an asterisk beside their “unlimited” claims on their home page explaining how “unlimited” in their dictionary doesn’t mean what it probably means in your dictionary.
Anyway, now is not the time to kick a competitor when they’re down over minor issues like what they say and what they mean. But it is interesting to note that a massive operation claiming to host millions of domains and/or websites apparently had no system in place for communicating with customers during such an outage. We’re not immune to the occasional technical glitch and communication fumble ourselves, but Endurance actually needed to go out and register a new domain and hastily set up a blog to keep their customers updated.
Kudos to them for doing what was needed when it was needed, but one does wonder if they’ll be maintaining this website for future issues.
Update, 2016-02-01: Nope, they didn’t. It’s now being squatted by a Japanese domain squatter.
