The LSF and associated sites have been down for several hours today due to a major outage at the data center where our servers are located. Our host provider is Hostgator who originally provided an excellent service with extremely good uptime. Unfortunately, they were acquired last month by a company called EIG who seems to be in the business of acquiring (and screwing up) a number of other host providers. This extended outage today will have affected hundreds of thousands if not millions of websites. For info, this was the message we received regarding the outage:
Our data center in Provo is currently experiencing network issues and they are working diligently to resolve the issue. Unfortunately we do not have an estimated time of resolution. This currently is affecting shared, reseller, VPS, and dedicated servers within that data center. We will update this post when further details are available.
You can see a further external report here:
http://mashable.com/2013/08/02/bluehost-down/Hopefully, things will settle down now but if not we'll have to consider changing hosts which, given we support a number of sites apart from the LSF, LSF Publications, Wellred Weekly and Bottom Lines, some of which have very specific technical configuration requirements, will no doubt mean several days of down time while we carry out the switch.
