Bitten by the outage bug

Well, we've had an exciting past 24 hours here at the Homestead office, as we've been struggling with a mysterious problem in our main data center.  It has forced us to place all websites into view-only mode, which means that your visitors and customers can see their pages, but you can't log in.  Believe me, we're not happy about this, especially the guy who forked over several million dollars (that would be me) to pay for the equipment that is currently failing, even though it's never supposed to.  Here's the current status:

• All websites and stores are viewable on the web, by all web visitors.
• Your email boxes are unaffected by this outage, and can be accessed by clicking "check email" at the top of our main site.
• Stores are open, and accepting purchases, but the transactions are being queued (i.e. credit cards are being securely collected but not processed).
• We are currently not allowing any Homestead customers to log in, or publish from SiteBuilder, because we are running on a backup system.
• We don't have an exact ETA of when we will be back up and fully functional, but I will post when we do.  I HATE it when the airline people tell me the plane is "going to be here in ten minutes" six times in a row, so I won't give you an exact time--but we're hopeful for this afternoon.

I wasn't planning on using my blog for this type of outage news (we haven't suffered an outage even close to something like this in 2 1/2 years), but we're trying to communicate via every possible channel.  To existing customers, thanks for all of the supportive emails, even the ones that are not so supportive.  It is a great honor to us that you count on Homestead to make your business successful, and on days like today we feel like we are letting you down.  At this point, all we can do is keep working around the clock.

If you're a potential customer, we've temporarily disabled the creation of new accounts because we are prioritizing restoring full access to our existing customers first, but please come back and see us soon!

More soon.

--jsk

Comments

[Erod]

Thanks for the heads up! I'll make sure and add a link to my blog post for readers to see.

[Lori Bruce]

Thank you so much for the explination. Just knowing your team is working on the issues eases the frustration.

[Ed Dejoie]

Thanks for the info. Having a blog link as a backup information resource in emergency situations is a needed assurance to you customers. Just knowing WHAT-WHY-WHEN and that you are working on resolving the issue is GREAT customer service to your clients!
Thanks

[Paul Marquis]

I have three URL's through Homestead,(for years now) and two of them are for my Marine brothers from Vietnam. We all depend on Homestead as our cyber home. I appreciate Homestead and all you offer. Sh-t happens, your doing great and thanks for keeping us posted.

Semper Fi,
Paul Marquis

[plein air workshop]

Been with Homestead since 1999. I have various business and organization sites that I run.
When the site is inaccesible, an earlier email to members would help eleviate panic mode and cut down on your phone traffic.
I will definitely bookmark this blog.