I have noticed that some of the shared hosting solutions like Hostgator have been having a handful of issues as of late, marking a bad few months for the companies. This mostly affects Hostgator though as it has experienced many hours worth of downtime for hundreds of websites.

How do I know? I have multiple websites through various services and some of them are hosted on these shared hosting servers simply due to cost vs the fact that those websites don’t exactly make money. Through the years, there have been some dark times for these companies, but this year takes the cake possibly.

Last month was the worst I have seen in a long time if I don’t include the tiny little companies I used to use a long time ago. Hostgator alone resulted in so many hours of downtime that took a few of my websites offline for a number of days in the first week of the month. Since then, there have been random downtimes, some lasting a half hour, some minutes.

In fact, the latest was just moments ago, which led to me wanting to write about this. This is also where the screenshots come from in this story.

I notice those sites are down again and immediately took to Twitter to see how big it is. Once again, hundreds of users were offline with many of them posting about it there and via other sources like Reddit. And these are just the website owners that noticed it.

It’s hard to say for sure what is causing so many issues since these companies don’t exactly tell you. Nor do they update their uptime promises listed on their websites as they always claim to have a near 99% uptime guarantee. Of course, there really isn’t a guarantee as they will never take responsibility for when downtime does occur past this.

For example, the downtime that Hostgator experienced last month that lasted for days came out of nowhere. Yet the company’s response was that it was due to a planned server move and that it may lead to up to 20 minutes or so of downtime. However, how can it be planned if no communication about it was sent to their customers? Imagine how many companies lost money from suddenly falling offline without any notice. No reasonable time to be able to react to it somehow and be prepared for it. Not to mention they kept saying 20 minutes even though they had already been down for nearly a day at that point.

Honestly isn’t really a strong point with these companies. Meanwhile, since the major outage, there has been a number of other outages. Again, stories and excuses, but never taking responsibility for it. People cry for refunds or credits but they never get them. Instead, the cost of these hosts has been rising noticeably over the years.

The only real solution is to move to a better host. If you are going to spend that kind of money, you might as well put it toward a company that tries harder to deliver. Maybe try a company like Bluehost or Siteground. Personally, I will be pulling anything on HG myself and moving it to one of these other options.