SiteGround hosting interruption-what happened

Beginning Monday, November 8, 2021, SiteGround web hosting suffered a severe interruption for four days. It was not until November 12th that they tweeted that they had solved the problem. As the holiday shopping season approaches, many customers have lost their rankings on Google and a large amount of website traffic.

Many SiteGround publishers still feel uneasy, mainly because they believe that recovery from lost Google search traffic is slow.

What caused the SiteGround problem?

A statement provided by SiteGround shows that the issue has nothing to do with the issue between Amazon Global Accelerator and Google Crawler.

According to SiteGround:

“On Friday, we managed to isolate the Google robot crawling issue from the network issues that only target the Amazon Global Accelerator and Google crawler robot subnets.

We implemented a fix to circumvent this issue, and we are happy to say that our clients’ websites can now be crawled correctly, and most of them have returned to their rankings.

We are still working closely with Amazon and Google to find the cause of the problem.

According to the latest update, we suspect this is a routing issue, and Amazon is contacting Google to try to narrow the scope. We know from Amazon that their other customers have also been affected. “

What is Amazon Global Accelerator?

Amazon Global Accelerator is a service that helps resolve network congestion on the Internet to help speed up websites.

How is this Amazon describes the global accelerator:

“AWS Global Accelerator is a network service that can use Amazon Web Services’ global network infrastructure to increase the performance of user traffic by up to 60%. When the Internet is congested, AWS Global Accelerator optimizes the path of the application to maintain data packets Loss, jitter, and delay are always low.”

SiteGround solves the problem

SiteGround Tweet On Friday, November 12th, they have identified the problem and fixed it.

“Status update: We are happy to inform you that we have implemented fixes for some of the Google robot crawling issues encountered by some websites. The site has been successfully crawled. Please wait a few hours for the DNS changes to take effect. Thank you for your patience wait!”

Nearly a week after the hosting interruption began, SiteGround publicly announced the cause of the problem on Monday, November 15.

SiteGround Tweet:

“Status update: On Friday, we managed to isolate the Google bot crawling issue from the network issues that only target the Amazon Global Accelerator and Google crawler bot subnets. We implemented a fix to bypass this issue.”

site Followed by a tweet Express their happiness:

“We are happy to say that most of our clients’ websites are now being crawled, and most of them have returned to their rankings.”

Followed by Another tweet Report successful repair:

“All the websites hosted on our side are fully functional, and requests submitted from any other service have no DNS resolution issues.”

SiteGround customers are still upset

SiteGround implemented a fix. But many customers still feel uneasy over the weekend because their websites still seem to be affected.

This may not be a problem with SiteGround, but caused by a delay in the DNS system, because the information is propagated on the Internet, which may take several days.

Positive reports from SiteGround customers

Some customers report that their website has been restored:

So far everything is back to normal. In fact, I might benefit from spam updates indirectly, so it’s actually better than usual😅😅🙈

-Norman Schwartz (@pelerinages) November 15, 2021

I use the SG name server again. it works. I also saw a website that has returned to the top of Google. call. Fingers crossed.

-Reinout te Brake (@reinouttebrake) November 14, 2021

Many negative tweets about SiteGround

Some publishers continue to post tweets about their ongoing problems over the weekend, which may be related to DNS information or Google’s having to re-crawl the site.

Despite this, customers still tweeted about the slow recovery of website traffic.

I still encounter indexing problems on many of the sites I manage.

— Jack Boyle Consulting (@JBCAUS) November 14, 2021

@SiteGround Your DNS issues have caused 50% of my sites to be removed from the Google index and 60% of my daily traffic has been lost. Until today, I have not received any e-mail explaining this matter. Your CEO should apologize publicly for the inconvenience caused to users.

— Ocean W (@OceanW62958303) November 15, 2021

We have been losing money in recent days because of your “question” and you said “Thank you for your patience”. Do you want to pay it back or something? ! This is scary and frustrating! ! !

-Ma Paula (@mapaulaguti) November 15, 2021

There are a few more posts that are not on Google. It took hours to browse, check, and request re-indexing. Do you know how long it will take?

— AbFabTravels (@Abfabtravels) November 15, 2021

@SiteGround , I still have the same problem. The error still exists. https://t.co/62Wf7ryfmD

— Cartoon (@toondebacker) November 13, 2021

Are you sure the problem has been solved? Still experiencing a decline in traffic… 😔

-Pietro L. Carotenuto (@pietrolcdotcom) November 14, 2021

I just tried to index one of the sites I manage, but it has been rejected. The problem is far from solved. The update should be posted on our hosting dashboard!

-Black and White (@bwglawuk) November 13, 2021

site Replied to these tweets Reiterate on Monday, November 15 that the problem should have been resolved:

“We have deployed a fix so that Google bots can crawl the websites we host.

Many customers have confirmed that this issue should now be resolved on our platform.

Please provide us with some URL examples and other information so that we can help further. “

Why do SiteGround customers continue to suffer?

Although SiteGround announced that the issue has been resolved, some customers continue to suffer traffic loss.

This is not surprising, and perhaps SiteGround can help customers ensure that they understand what will happen next when Google has to re-index the site.

Basically, when a site is lost for a long time, Google will start to delete the lost site from its index. This is what SiteGround customers experienced during the weekend.

However, Google has never really disappeared. Google’s crawler, Googlebot, will continue to return the missing site to check if it has returned.

Once a website returns after a long absence, it may take several days to as many as ten days to fully recover, depending on the number of pages that need to be re-crawled.

A few years ago, my own experience was that thousands of web pages temporarily disappeared, and it took about ten days to recover after a two-week interruption.

But for most publishers with smaller sites, the recovery speed may be much faster.

Google provides insights on site restoration

Google’s John Mueller tweeted some useful information that SiteGround customers should expect Google to re-index their website in the coming days.

Google’s John Mueller posted an opinion on Twitter About this process in October:

“If you’re curious about what’s happening in Google search, such as Facebook’s recent outage, this is usually a two-part response: when we can’t access a site due to network/DNS reasons, we treat it as 5xx HTTP server error. This means we have reduced crawling:”

Then:

“The URL is still indexed as it is, and the ranking of the site remains the same as before. But this is a temporary state. If we become a persistent error (if it persists for more than 1-2 days), we will start removing these from the index URL.”

Muller Tweet The power outage will not cause Google to change the ranking of the site after the site is restored.

“When this happens, the ranking will not change directly-we don’t think the site is of low quality or similar, but if these URLs are not indexed, they will not be ranked.”

After fixing the interruption, Google will re-crawl the site. It’s important to note that until Google finishes re-crawling the site, the site cannot restore its previous ranking.

Mueller tweeted:

“When the site is restored, if we delete URLs from the index, they will usually reappear once we successfully crawl them again. If we know the server is okay, the crawling will speed up again.”

John Mueller reiterated this guarantee in a series of statements on November 12, 2021. tweets:

“Once the problem is resolved, Googlebot crawling and indexing will automatically start again. As the error disappears, the crawl rate will increase over time, and the deleted URL will be re-crawled over time Take it and re-enter the index. Visibility will stabilize again.”

He reiterated that the power outage will not have a lasting impact.

John Tweet:

“Temporary power outages like this usually do not have a lasting impact. Technical issues come and go, and we must do our best to ensure that users can find your wonderful website through search results.”

Muller Tweet This quick reindexing technique:

“If you have important pages that need to be reprocessed quickly, I will resubmit them using “Check URL” in Search Console. Within the site, it is also good to use internal links to highlight and link to content you really care about.”

Most of the replies to Mueller’s tweets were positive, but not enough to make some people downplay their lingering feelings.

This is fine, there may not be a lasting effect, but what about the immediate effect? No new content can be found, and there are still two weeks to go until Black Friday. This is one of the biggest periods of e-commerce, so it is impossible to crawl the lasting impact of new content on revenue…

-ChadWyatt (@ChadWyatt14) November 13, 2021

Site resumed from temporary interruption

What happened last week is simply unprecedented. SiteGround is widely regarded as a reliable web host in the industry, which is why it is so popular.

As Google continues to crawl and re-index the temporarily exited sites, the site should return to its previous ranking within a few days.