On 9 September, a storm hit Phoenix, Arizona, and knocked out the cooling system at a data centre there. Nine hours later, more than 180,000 businesses worldwide, most of whom had never given Phoenix a second thought, watched their websites, email and online shops go dark. If your first reaction is “that’s got nothing to do with me,” this one’s worth five minutes anyway. It’s a good excuse to ask a question most small business owners never think to ask: where does my website actually live, and what happens if that place has a bad day?
What actually happened
When the air conditioning failed, the servers inside that data centre started overheating. To stop equipment being damaged, and data being lost for good, the facility had to power things down in a controlled way rather than let temperatures keep climbing. That’s the safe, sensible thing to do. It’s also the thing that took thousands of websites offline for the best part of a working day. Several well-known hosting companies rent space in that same building, so the outage wasn’t limited to one brand. It rippled out across all of them at once.
Why one broken fan can take down businesses that have never heard of each other
Most websites, including ones for small businesses in the UK, are hosted somewhere else entirely, often in a huge building on another continent that the owner has never seen and never thinks about. That’s not a bad thing in itself. It’s how the internet works, and it’s usually cheaper and more reliable than trying to run your own server in a cupboard. But it does mean your website’s uptime is only ever as good as the physical building it sits in, plus everything that building depends on, from the power grid to the air conditioning. When something goes wrong at that level, it doesn’t matter how careful you’ve been with your own site. You’re along for the ride.
This wasn’t really a story about a “bad” host
It’s tempting to read a headline like this and assume the businesses affected must have picked a cut-price, dodgy hosting company. They didn’t, necessarily. Some well-regarded, popular hosts were caught up in this. The real difference between hosts isn’t whether something can ever go wrong, it can, for anyone. It’s what happens next: how quickly they notice, how honestly they communicate while it’s happening, and how well they’ve planned for exactly this kind of failure, ideally so a problem in one building doesn’t take your specific site down with it.
Three things worth checking about your own hosting
You don’t need to become a hosting expert to ask better questions. First, does your host publish a live status page during incidents, or do they go quiet and leave you refreshing social media for updates? Second, is there any kind of uptime guarantee, and what actually happens if they miss it: a credit, an apology, or nothing at all? Third, if your specific host had a bad night, do you know how your site and its backups would be restored, and roughly how long that would take? You don’t need perfect answers to all three. You just need to know you could find out, rather than discovering the gaps live, during nine hours of silence.
The takeaway
Nobody can promise a website that never goes down. Anyone who does is probably not being straight with you. What you can control is who’s looking after it, how they behave when things do go wrong, and whether you’d actually hear about a problem from them, rather than from an angry customer. If reading this has made you wonder how your own site is hosted, or you realise you’ve never actually checked, it might be worth a second look.
That’s exactly the kind of thing our Managed Hosting service takes off your plate: reliable hosting, proper monitoring, and a human to call if anything ever does go wrong. Take a look at Managed Hosting if you’d rather not find out about the next outage from an angry customer.
