My web hosting provider, MacHighway.com, apparently botched a datacenter migration, and on Saturday, 9 October 2021 at approximately 20:00 UTC all of my hosted domains, websites, and email went offline. MacHighway did a horrible job of alerting affected customers, and didn’t post any updates for some time. Even their own websites were offline for awhile. They eventually posted on Twitter and Facebook, but only provided updates about once per day, and several times claimed they were “95%” restored or “all systems back online” when many clients were still down. On Tuesday, they posted on Twitter that if you were still experiencing issues to reach out to support at Deluxe, MacHighway’s parent company. I emailed them Tuesday night, and only got an automated reply.
That reply email, though, had a phone number to contact support at Deluxe, so I called them this morning. Unlike the folks at MacHighway, the support team at Deluxe actually answers their phone, and I was able to speak with two support people. They were able to see the same issue that I had reported 24 hours earlier, that the external, internet-facing DNS name servers were returning the wrong IP addresses for hosted domains. The escalated the issue to their tier 3 admin team.
By about 1600 UTC today, 13 October 2021, Deluxe or MacHighway had finally resolved the DNS issue, and I began receiving email again, and my websites have come back online!
I may edit this post later with more details, but for now, I’m happy to be reconnected!
Update: Since they resolved the initial outage, I’m seeing intermittent issues where I’m getting “Unable to establish a connection with the database” errors. I’ve opened another ticket with MacHighway, which they updated/resolved last night, but it’s still occurring on Thursday 10/14/2021…