What was the cause of heart internet's downtime?

You may or may not have noticed some downtime on your website since Thursday through to the time of writing...

It has been an unfortunate weekend for a couple of webhosting companies - We know that CloudNext (a hosting provider) experienced some issues on Thursday.  Seemingly at the same time, Heart Internet - a very widely used hosting company - has had a real nightmare this weekend, causing downtime to thousands of websites.  The blame was initially attributed to hackers attacking the system, but was later revealed to be a power failure at a data centre in Nottingham.  This status is being humorously referred to as "TITSUP" - "Total Inability To Support Usual Performance" by some media outlets.

This has had far reaching effects.  We've seen some sites experiencing downtime despite not even using Heart for hosting.  This is largely due to websites which may have been hosted with Heart in a past life, still using Heart or Heart-reseller nameservers.  It's also possible to be using Heart for mailserver, despite the rest of the site being hosted elsewhere.

When will it be fixed?

Most servers seem to be restored now.  If you're one of our clients - while we aren't necessarily responsible for your hosting set up, if you are having hosting problems, feel free to drop me an e-mail and I'll happily check if it is related. 

If you're an exceptional enough character to be one of our lovely clients...

We often recommend our chiselled chums over at BisonGrid for hosting solutions.  If you're hosted with BisonGrid, yet experienced some downtime, this is probably down to the nameservers, which may not have been transferred to the Bisons when they took over.  I'll have a thorough look at this during next month's MOTs and the likelihood is that we will recommend that you transfer the nameservers to BisonGrid as well.  This is not to say BisonGrid are immune to such issues - Heart were unfortunate enough to have both a power failure and issues with the UPS system which is very unlucky - however moving BG hosted sites to BG nameservers is a good recommendation for getting optimal speeds anyway.