Major Hosting Failure – Lessons And Opportunities

Are your websites among the millions hosted at one of the Endurance International Group (EIG)’s 24 brands that include HostGator, BlueHost, HostMonster and JustHost?

All of mine are.

All day yesterday I was overseeing projects being done on several of my websites (including this one), and everything ground to a halt because of a major outage – not to mention that none of my visitors could access any of my sites either.

Social media was abuzz with questions and complaints about the downtime, starting with the earliest complaints on Twitter around 9:00am Central Time. The official HostGator and Bluehost twitter feeds initially stated that everything was running smoothly, but around 2:00pm came the first official recognition of the problem from both accounts…

About three hours later, HostGator tweeted that service was almost fully restored…

Yet even an hour later, BlueHost acknowledged that everything still wasn’t fixed…

In between, as you can imagine, Twitter was full of angry tweets from frustrated customers.

Some expressed their displeasure with sarcasm (*WARNING: 6th one below is For Adults Only)…

Others simply stated their disgust directly…

Many EIG customers tweeted their intention to leave the company, including…

Business Lesson #1:

Respond as swiftly and appropriately to any and all of your customer complaints.

All throughout the several hours of the outage, the support teams of the individual hosting companies responded to each individual tweet with reassuring messages that they were working to fix the problems.

Which brings me to…

Business Lesson #2:

Whenever one of your competitors experiences a major problem (the more public, the better), take immediate and decisive action to capitalize on the opportunity.

I’ll use this one tweet as an example…

Several hosting companies responded directly to Adam’s frustrated tweet, including these four…

While others posted general tweets to no one in particular…

At least one twitter member used the strategy of tweeting a link to a blog post she wrote a few months ago (the last time these hosting companies had a similar major outage), where she recommended an alternative hosting company with her affiliate link…

And another simply alerted people to take advantage of the companies’
“99% Uptime Or Get 1 Month Free” Guarantee…

Which brings us to…

Business Lesson #3:

Do the math whenever you guarantee your products or services, and make sure you can afford to pay your disgruntled customers, clients or patients who request it.

*On that note, it’s likely that a large number of EIG’s customers either didn’t notice that their sites were down for a few hours, or they won’t bother to submit a claim for their free month of service.

And finally, we have…

Business Lesson #4:

Whenever you have a problem in your business (yes, it’s a matter of “when” – not “if”), make sure to analyze the situation thoroughly and take action to correct it. That’s a hallmark of every successful entrepreneur – we know how to turn a negative into a positive.

Will EIG successfully do that?

So far, so good – EIG’s stock price was only down a little over 1% yesterday, despite this major outage.

And that raises an interesting, overriding question about this whole mess…

Is it possible that the market considers such major disruptions in service simply routine for this company?

And if so, will they really care about fixing whatever issues keep causing them?

Big companies can often survive despite shoddy products and services – but small businesses should never risk it. Before HostGator, BlueHost, etc. were bought out and EIG went public, there weren’t nearly as many issues as there have been since they became a part of the world of Big Business.

According to a recent poll conducted by American Express…

• 93% of US consumers believe it’s important to support the local small businesses that they value in their community
• 87% believe that small businesses are a critical element of the overall U.S. economic health
• 73% consciously shop at small businesses in their community because they do not want them to go away

This positive sentiment towards small business isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, especially when people experience major problems – and unsatisfactory responses – from big companies, as happened with yesterday’s internet website hosting major outage.

Therefore, dear reader, it is my sincere wish for you to continue to take the right actions and create a better and better experience for your customers, clients or patients, so that they will continue to have a great reason to choose to do business with you over your larger, impersonal, less-caring competitors.

And also, that you have a Fantastic 2014!

Stick around, and I’ll help you do that.

Happy New Year!