InMotion hosting suffered a major hardware failure on Monday, December 13, 2021. The point of failure is the RAID array, which is the hard disk. The current state is that the server is restoring using the latest backup.
InMotion server failure
The server failure seems to affect only one server, and the affected server is named, ecbiz213.
If your website is functioning normally, this outage will not affect your website at all.
Last night, our server ecbiz213 suffered a major hardware failure related to the server hard drive. We are working hard to notify all affected customers as soon as possible and transfer all accounts to the new hardware. 1/2
— InMotion hosting (@inmotionhosting) December 14, 2021
InMotion hosting customer feedback
InMotion has been processing customer feedback on Twitter. However, some people reported that they did not receive notification.
The hosted email account may be associated with a shut down server, in which case you will not receive any support emails.
A client, Jason B. (of Logos-Daily.com@Logos_Daily) Share their experience:
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“I didn’t receive any notification from InMotion Hosting at all. They publicly shared mixed details about what happened (if you visit their status page, it’s “unplanned maintenance”, if you chat with them privately, it’s ” hardware malfunction”……) .
All the information I received, I had to dig to find it.
I don’t even know that my website is down until someone pings me and let me know that the website is not working properly.
Come and see, we are not even sure if we can fully restore these sites (their support says). “
Another InMotion customer shared a similar story on Twitter:
it says @inmotionhosting The server works, but I haven’t heard anything from their support team, and my site is still down…It doesn’t look good after a major hardware failure.https://t.co/2RAP3slUYE
— 𝗝𝗮𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝗕 🤷🏼♂️ (@itsmejasonb) December 14, 2021
To our credit, InMotion Hosting has been actively responding to customer questions on Twitter.
According to InMotion hosting:
“We regret to inform you that on Monday, December 13, 2021, at 12:30 PM (EST), ecbiz213 suffered a major hardware failure related to the server hard drive.
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Despite our team’s best efforts, the RAID array is still considered unrecoverable. “
InMotion updated their support page today to point out that they can find more up-to-date backups, which is good news.
This means that they will be able to restore the website, hoping to revert to the latest version.
Website backup
It is for this reason that it is always a good idea to have a backup on hand. Although web hosts usually maintain backups of their hard drives, maintaining daily or weekly backups is definitely the best practice.
Even for relatively static websites, it’s still a good practice to back up the website every day, because these backups will be helpful in the event of a hacking attack, which will allow the website to be restored to the state it was in before the hacking incident, and repair any from there. Existing loopholes to prevent hackers from happening again.
Hard drives are prone to failure
I manage my own server and have received these notifications about disk sector errors in the past. This is a clue that the disk is beginning to fail. In these cases, I learned from previous crashes and requested replacement disks before they failed.
Hard drive failures on servers are inevitable, so it is important to pay close attention to disk performance. Usually server monitoring can detect and report disk errors before the disk completely crashes.
InMotion has these, but somehow it can’t take the initiative until it fails.
According to a spokesperson for InMotion:
“InMotion Hosting engineers use various checks to actively monitor the health of all disks and replace them when they show symptoms of impending failure.
In addition to using software such as Icinga to monitor drives, we also have an on-site data center team to manage our hardware, allowing us to take quick action and replace drives. “
Patience is the best response
Migrating to a new server can be cumbersome and sometimes cause ranking fluctuations.
In this case, there is no reason to move to another server. An InMotion spokesperson pointed out that all customer websites are currently being restored.
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“As of today, the system team is working hard to find more recent backups on the server for our customers.
They are currently checking the restore on the server and making sure that the latest backup is restored. Our system team will restore the account as soon as possible from the latest backup we have on file. “
