Facebook reviews by long-term WPX customers

As the co-owner of WPX Hosting, I can assure you that nothing is a higher priority for us than maintaining uptime for all of our customers.

And when sites go down, the automatic assumption is that the hosting company is to blame – we get that, even if it isn’t always accurate such as in this case (we are bloggers and Web entrepreneurs too).

On Friday, October 21 2016, a massive and unprecedented DDOS attack was launched that was so severe in nature that it knocked huge brand sites like Twitter, Reddit, Soundcloud and Spotify, among many others, offline:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37738823
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/the-massive-ddos-attack-that-almost-brought-down-us-internet-%E2%80%93-how-it-happened-and-why/ar-AAjhbCU?li=AAgfYrC

In fact, the usual uptime reporting tools like Pingdom and Uptime Robot became so unreliable as a result that Pingdom stopped their alerts service over the weekend:

http://status.pingdom.com/incidents/9d2pcyz87clf

where Pingdom officially stated:

“We have made this decision because we have found that the alerts we currently send are unreliable and essentially useless.”

We are still seeing both of these services as unreliable with a lot of false positives being reported at the moment even though Pingdom have resumed their alerts, prematurely as it turns out as they are returning a ton of false positives even now (Monday, October 24 2016).

What may or may not be related is a major USA connectivity issue right now that is affecting most Internet operations there e.g. (read live comments too):

Huge number of disrupted services today (October 24 2016) including Comcast and Verizon:

http://downdetector.com/archive/

and

http://downdetector.com/status/att (61% of reports are for Internet down for AT&T customers)

and Time Warner’s horde of angry customers here (see comments also):

http://downdetector.com/status/time-warner-cable/map/

To check how your site is loading from different locations we recommend https://www.uptrends.com/tools/uptime e.g.

and also https://tools.keycdn.com/performance e.g.

Though it can also be inaccurate, try your site on http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ to verify that it might be down or is just a connectivity issue in your location.

Traffic-wise, our server load here is only very slightly down which suggests that most sites are functioning normally but again, this is NOT a WPX hosting issue as the above links/articles prove but rather a broader, intermittent and infuriating problem with the Web infrastructure generally.

https://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/internet-service-disrupted-in-large-parts-of-eastern-u-s

We are closely monitoring the situation and are in constant contact with our infrastructure partners but these are broader issues that are beyond our control, something that is as frustrating for us as it is for you.

There is not a lot that can be done at the moment and even the drastic and inconvenient step of moving to another hosting provider is absolutely no guarantee of service improvement given how these issues are affecting so many (very big) Internet services at the moment.

We will update you as more information becomes available.

Thanks for your patience and let us know if you have further questions.

Best regards
Terry Kyle
Co-owner, WPX Hosting