3.6 million websites taken offline after fire at OVH datacenters

Around 3.6 million websites across 464,000 distinct domains were taken offline after the major fire at an OVHcloud datacenter site in Strasbourg overnight.

More than 18% of the IP addresses attributed to OVH in Netcraft’s most recent Web Server Survey — which took place two weeks ago — were no longer responding at 06:00-07:15 UTC this morning.

Load monitoring graph.

A load monitoring graph of a server that was running at one of OVH’s Strasbourg datacenters.
It was last updated at 01:13 UTC today, indicating when it became inaccessible during the fire.

Thankfully, everybody is safe; but OVH said the fire in its SBG2 datacenter was not controllable and no data is likely to be recoverable. Part of its SBG1 datacenter has also been destroyed. Firefighters were protecting SBG3 throughout the night, and although there was no direct fire impact on SBG4, it was also unavailable due to the whole site being isolated. Consequently, all services in SGB1-4 have been offline.

Websites that went offline during the fire included online banks, webmail services, news sites, online shops selling PPE to protect against coronavirus, and several countries’ government websites.

Examples of the latter included websites used by the Polish Financial Ombudsman; the Ivorian DGE; the French Plate-forme des achats de l’Etat; the Welsh Government’s Export Hub; and the UK Government’s Vehicle Certification Agency website, which got a new SSL certificate by 10am and is now back online with a UK hosting company.

Chrome error message showing the site cannot be reached.

Banking websites have also been hit by the fire.

Unsurprisingly for a French hosting company, the most affected country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is .fr, which had 184,000 knocked-out websites spread across 59,600 distinct domain names – these account for 1.9% of all .fr domains in the world. In comparison, there were only 24,100 .uk websites hosted in the affected datacenters, across just 8,700 unique domains. Most of the affected websites use the generic .com top-level domain, amounting to 880,000 websites across 180,000 domains.

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Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in February 2021

Rank Performance Graph OS Outage
hh:mm:ss
Failed
Req%
DNS Connect First
byte
Total
1 www.choopa.com Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.242 0.005 0.027 0.027
2 Rackspace Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.433 0.011 0.024 0.024
3 Webair Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.299 0.069 0.139 0.139
4 Hyve Managed Hosting Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.151 0.076 0.151 0.151
5 CWCS Managed Hosting Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.320 0.083 0.167 0.167
6 GoDaddy.com Inc Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.371 0.008 0.038 0.040
7 New York Internet (NYI) FreeBSD 0:00:00 0.005 0.509 0.061 0.123 0.123
8 Bigstep Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.212 0.082 0.163 0.163
9 ServerStack Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.223 0.082 0.164 0.164
10 Swishmail Linux 0:00:00 0.011 0.222 0.082 0.163 0.163

See full table

Choopa.com took the top spot as the most reliable hosting company site in February. The top five hosting company sites all had no failed requests during the month, with the ranking decided by fastest average connection time. Choopa.com had the fastest connection time out of all of the top 10 hosting company websites, at just 5ms. In the past 12 months Choopa.com appeared in the top 10 nine times. Choopa.com offers a range of services including cloud hosting, dedicated hosting and colocation in its own primary facility in Piscataway, New Jersey as well as other facilities in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Tokyo.

Spots two and three in February go to Rackspace and Webair. Rackspace provide a wide variety of cloud services from its global network of over 50 locations in five continents, and Webair offer managed and private cloud services, storage and backup solutions from its eight facilities in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal, London, Paris, Amsterdam and Singapore.

Continue reading Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in February 2021

Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in January 2021

Rank Performance Graph OS Outage
hh:mm:ss
Failed
Req%
DNS Connect First
byte
Total
1 Rackspace Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.454 0.014 0.029 0.029
2 New York Internet (NYI) FreeBSD 0:00:00 0.000 0.545 0.060 0.118 0.118
3 EveryCity SmartOS 0:00:00 0.000 0.232 0.077 0.154 0.154
4 ServerStack Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.229 0.086 0.170 0.170
5 www.dinahosting.com Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.248 0.093 0.187 0.187
6 Webair Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.319 0.070 0.141 0.141
7 CWCS Managed Hosting Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.317 0.082 0.163 0.163
8 Pair Networks Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.356 0.099 0.199 0.199
9 www.choopa.com Linux 0:00:00 0.010 0.254 0.005 0.027 0.027
10 Hyve Managed Hosting Linux 0:00:00 0.010 0.160 0.076 0.151 0.151

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Rackspace kicked off 2021 with the most reliable hosting company site in January. The top five hosting company sites each responded to all of Netcraft’s requests in January and were separated by average connection time. Rackspace offers a variety of cloud hosting solutions from 40 data centres across five different continents in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia.

The podium is completed by New York Internet (NYI) and EveryCity. NYI offers bare metal, cloud and colocation services from its four data centres in the US. UK-based EveryCity provides cloud hosting solutions and managed third-party services from its primary data centre located in the heart of London.

ServerStack and dinahosting also responded to all of Netcraft’s requests in January. ServerStack maintains its place in the top 10 and has now appeared 11 times in the past 12 months, more than any other hosting company site. ServerStack provides managed and dedicated solutions from its three data centres in North America and Europe. dinahosting offers its services from Interxion, in Madrid, and customers can choose from a range of cloud and managed solutions as well as register domain names.

FreeBSD appeared in second place in January with NYI and SmartOS appeared in third place with EveryCity. Linux was used by the other eight sites in the top 10.

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Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in December 2020

Rank Performance Graph OS Outage
hh:mm:ss
Failed
Req%
DNS Connect First
byte
Total
1 www.choopa.com Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.270 0.005 0.024 0.024
2 Webair Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.327 0.071 0.141 0.141
3 krystal.uk Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.255 0.088 0.176 0.176
4 GoDaddy.com Inc Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.409 0.009 0.042 0.044
5 Rackspace Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.466 0.010 0.021 0.021
6 New York Internet (NYI) FreeBSD 0:00:00 0.005 0.556 0.058 0.116 0.116
7 Hyve Managed Hosting Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.181 0.077 0.153 0.153
8 CWCS Managed Hosting Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.338 0.082 0.166 0.166
9 ServerStack Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.251 0.083 0.166 0.166
10 www.dinahosting.com Linux 0:00:00 0.010 0.291 0.094 0.189 0.189

See full table

Choopa.com finished 2020 as the most reliable hosting company site in December, with no failed requests and the fastest average connection time. Choopa.com topped the table four times in 2020, more than any other hosting company site, and made a total of eight appearances in the top 10. The hosting provider offers cloud hosting, dedicated hosting and colocation in its own primary facility in Piscataway, New Jersey as well as smaller facilities in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Tokyo.

Continue reading Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in December 2020

How the Edge Improves Microservices

Microservice architecture has transformed the way we develop and operate our applications. Microservices aren’t a technology or a programming language. Instead, they create a structure for designing and building applications based on the idea that the … Continue reading How the Edge Improves Microservices

How the Edge Improves Microservices

Microservice architecture has transformed the way we develop and operate our applications. Microservices aren’t a technology or a programming language. Instead, they create a structure for designing and building applications based on the idea that the individual functions of a website should operate independently. From this simple concept comes a multitude of benefits including: Continue reading How the Edge Improves Microservices