Sorry about the bumpy ride on GreatLakesBass.com today

[djkimmel]

First time I've seen this kind of thing - the story is sometime very early this morning the big network web server center out there in Provo Utah that houses GreatLakesBass.com on one of its many servers swapped out some hardware and something happened...

I don't know if something else failed or what for sure but the ability to connect to the leased, managed server that runs all my websites became lost or intermittent. For a long time, my webserver and the site were up but some people, me included for a good chunk of the day, couldn't get to any websites on my server.

Since I've been back on it appears my web server actually never went down so it was a network issue. There's talk of a router going down but looking at the large number of screaming, angry website owners all over the Internet, it had to be one really big router?!?

Some of you may have noticed it a little. Some of you may have noticed it a lot. I noticed it a lot for a while. It was better or worse depending upon your connection route. I could get back on with my phone a lot earlier than I could with my home network.

Things may still be a little bumpy overnight for some people as the routes and connections stabilize again. This outage affected a lot of of servers being used by several of the bigger Internet web hosts. First time since I started in December 2005 seeing an outage at one facility that affected so many sites for so many hours. I hope it's the last time...

[djkimmel]

Earlier at least 1 web host was reporting that the routing and network connections problems today were not the result of any Internet attack. I found it a strange coincidence that the Idaho to California area and the Midwest had a ~62% increase in attacks today during this same time? Might be unrelated but maybe why some people I know today in the Michigan area had other Internet issues such as phone VOIP being down or intermittent? There were some pretty big websites I couldn't get to today.

I know my server received a higher than average flood of spam attempts anyway. Maybe less spam traffic was blocked because some services were down or not responding? Chicken or the egg I guess. As long as spam / bad traffic levels go down and the server or network connection don't, I'll be happier.

[djkimmel]

I was aware my server company was bought by a bigger company but I didn't know how many hosting companies have now been bought by this one company. EIG now owns at least 54 web hosting companies including most of the bigger originally independent ones I've heard of like HostGator (mine), Bluehost, Hostmonster, Justhost, iPage, iPower, eHost, Fatcow, Domain.com, Netfirms... and on.

Enough of the bigger hosts are now concentrated in that same facility in Provo Utah where my server was moved in March (from Texas) that they created a new website today just for this all-day marathon hardware failure and stability loss issue - enduranceresponse.com. I found this out late this evening while checking through the zillions of responses to frantic customers over on the Bluehost Twitter feed. I'm sure glad I wasn't the person who had to handle that crazy response all day!!! They burned more than a few FTE's today just on that!

Just like many product lines in our fishing industry, the hosting industry is getting bigger and smaller at the same time too. As I like to say, it's better to know who's making (or controlling) what to help make the best choices available... I saw lot's of "that's it! I'm quitting 'company x' and moving all my websites to 'company y!'" comments online today. Pretty funny since both 'company x' and 'company y' would be companies in the same building having this same issue today!!