As of August 21, 19:30 UTC, the network in iFastNet’s datacenter has gone down. Because of this, all free and premium hosting services, websites and infrastructure is currently unreachable.
The only thing unaffected are the free hosting nameservers, which are hosted in multiple datacenters.
Which components are affected by this issue
All free and premium hosting infrastructure, except for free hosting DNS.
This includes:
All websites.
FTP.
File Manager.
Control Panel.
What issues may you see
On your website, you will see some kind of Connection Timed Out message. This also goes for certain management systems, such as the control panel and Softaculous.
In the client area, you may see various errors regarding being unable to connect to the hosting platform or unable to connect to your account.
When will this issue be resolved
Engineers are working to get this issue resolved as soon as possible. Unfortunately, it’s not known how long this will take.
This seems good so far, but iFastNet has had a few issues similar, last time this happened we lost databases and site files. Can you enable free plans to have site backups hosted on infinityfree directly please? This will at least allow us to have website/database backups so we can keep our files in case of something like this.
“This” particular issue never happened before. I’m not quite sure what the root cause of this was. There was a full datacenter outage before due to a cooling issue, which took a lot longer, but didn’t cause any data loss if I remember correctly.
Outages do happen, and there have been some which caused substantial data loss regrettably. However, this issue was entirely unrelated to any of those issues.
What happened here was a 30 minute network outage. There was no data loss.
What good do you think a backup would have done you here? Do you really think that you can:
Notice your website is down.
Download the backup.
Setup new hosting elsewhere.
Import your website using the backup.
Configure your domain name to use the new hosting.
Update all DNS caches everywhere in the world.
All in less than 30 minutes?
And no, daily or even weekly copying half a million websites from a datacenter, without direct system access is not something we can do. If iFastNet can’t make local backups work, and migrating servers takes days, what do you think I would be able to do?
I’m not sure who you are referring to as “we” and “us” in this suggestion. But if you, as a website owner want to have your own backups, I highly recommend you indeed get your own backups. You should never trust your hosting provider to manage all backups for you. But this also means that you shouldn’t trust InfinityFree to do it for you either.
It also shows connection to the site isn’t secure. I assume it’s related to this issue as well. But at least it stopped showing like that for my admin page. Just putting it out here, please correct me if I’m wrong since I’m no expert.
This outage had the worst timing for me as I announced this URL for the first time today as ready to go and it didn’t work. It was really good service while I was building the site until today’s outage. Hopefully they will restore it soon. Anyway, thanks to the providers for generosity of the service.
I’ve been following this thread and I really resonate with what you’re going through. These setbacks are part of the journey, but it’s important to remember that they are also opportunities to learn and grow. I appreciate your honesty in sharing these experiences, it helps to feel less alone.
Perhaps we can join forces and find creative solutions together? Despite the difficulties, I’m confident that we can all overcome this.
We would appreciate it if you could share:
What have you done so far to address the situation?
What challenges are you currently facing?
Please provide more details, it will help us better understand the situation and provide more comprehensive support.
“Can you enable free plans to have site backups hosted on infinityfree directly please? This will at least allow us to have website/database backups so we can keep our files in case of something like this.”
I have had some data losses in the past, so what I do now is I keep a couple of recent backups on Mega, so that even if the hosting company is taken over by the Borg, I can pop the site up anywhere WP (in my case) is installed.
