Today I woke up to see following banner on all my websites hosted on hostgator:- 503 Under Maintenance We are currently performing scheduled maintenance. We will be back soon! There Cpanel is also not opening. Its been an hour so I opened my emails to check whether I was informed about this so called scheduled maintenance but they did not. I am also facing slow server responses these days from hostgator which is unexpected from a large hosting company. Apart from this, hostgator is also sending other temporary errors atleast 2-3 times a week. I feel hostgator owes apology to me for showing this unexpected error without prior intimation. Is anyone facing similar problem with hostgator?
An update: I contacted their live chat and asked them why did they not informed me about this scheduled maintenance and their reply was: "According to our Terms of Services, we are not obligated to inform you about this." Not obliged to inform customers when their website will be down for 3 days (as people have reported it takes to restore) Can it be more rude and irresponsible? after a quick search I learnt that Hostgator got sold to EIG in Jun 2012 and since then people are leaving their servers after facing regular slowdown problems so now I am looking for a new host.
"According to our Terms of Services, we are not obligated to inform you about this." That's just rude answer if you ask me. I was facing incredible slow server responses too and it was getting worse every week. I saw 30 out of 100 in google page speed test, that was the last drop. I changed my hosting 3 days ago, now i saw 90 out of 100 in google page speed test. I suggest you to do the same thing.
Check out lowendbox.com for different VPS providers. I use linode.com and its great for responsiveness, uptime and support. Not sure if theyre listed on lowendbox.com or not.
They are changing their servers. I got an email from them stating it.My site went down for 3 hours last week but now everything is fine. No Worries !
This is the usual description of the 503 error: The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The explanation is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay. Please DO NOT refresh your web page in the browser at the moment, as it only overloads the server. Try to check your page in several minutes. When the server load decreases, your domain will start working again.
This 503 error thing lasted for 5 hours in my case and I was not informed about this in advance or even during & after . They did this during peak visitor hour of my websites. Even their customer care was clueless about why hostgator is showing 503 error on all of my websites. They were not aware of any server change or any kind of maintenance going on my websites. This is highly irresponsible and unprofessional. @wWhat Where did you shifted your website to, what hosting?
Hey - I'm with hostgator as well. I had an email beginning of June saying that they are "upgrading" the Cpanel however I should not lose out with any downtime. To my knowledge everything went fine. I read on another forum that if you have a few websites its best to have a few different hosting options - that way if the "host" goes down it doesnt take all your sites (and money) with it
soulspirit, I guess the issue was only with the server where your site was located.In such cases it is better not to wait long for the solution, it is better to call Hostgator and make a post in Twitter. They react to such calls and posts rather quickly.
@soulspirit I moved to knownhost. I've been with them little over a week and I'm really satisfied. You can check my post about knownhost; link