Two nights ago I got a 500 error on my site (internal servers down). Last time this happened I kind of freaked out and did a ton of troubleshooting, only to find that if I had just given it an hour or two it would be fine. So, lesson learned! I decided to go to bed and the next morning everything was fine. Buuut this time my site wouldn’t load at all! I gave it some time again before going to my web host’s site to try to contact them.

As it turns out, all their sites were down. Looks like the entire set of servers they use got messed up somehow. After trying to search for answers, I decided to find them on Facebook and discovered that they’d posted a message about the outage. I’m curious though, what they were doing for the past 8 hours… my best guess is that the maintenance was automated and routine, so they might not have caught the issue until they got to work this morning. Or, maybe it really takes that long for them to fix an issue this large. I mean, even all their sites were down so it looks like every single part of their network was kaput.

This does explain another question I had: why I hadn’t received emails since 4 AM EST. Since I use an email with my domain name, no incoming messages were making it. I wonder if I’ll be able to recover those emails when the servers are back up or if they’ve been lost in web wilderness forever. Hopefully nothing important was supposed to reach me at that time! My site is back up for now, but I’m still not sure if it’s all clear since it was up a little earlier and then wouldn’t load again. I hate this feeling of uncertainty! I should probably look into backing up my site on another server just in case.

Once things look resolved, I’m going to reach out to JustHost to complain if they don’t automatically offer some sort of compensation for this. A ton of people commenting on their Facebook page think similarly and I’m just glad I don’t need my site to make money, or else I’d be much more upset too! This kind of interruption of business is not good.

What would you do if your servers were down for nearly half a day?