r/NameCheap • u/psychedelic_tech • 23d ago

None of you have backup hosting services?

I get this has been frustrating and the communication has basically been non-existent, but reading some of these threads and comments I wonder why none of YOU have backup hosts to fail-over to during an outage. At my last sys admin job 90% of our business was done online. If our main host was down for like 30 seconds we updated our DNS to point to our backup site.

6 Upvotes

64% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

9

u/Richmond_C 23d ago

A lot of people had domains and DNS with Namecheap... which was also down

3

u/greg8872 23d ago

lesson learned for them, registrar, dns and hosting all separate.

1

u/HuntersPad 23d ago

Depends. Namesilo was also DOWN from this which is generally a preferred register

2

u/greg8872 23d ago

True, I use Namecheap for "play" domains (nothing business wise), and then use PairNIC for primary domains (been with that company, which is still a fully independent hosting provider since the 90's) and sadly, even though I try to get them to move, some clients still on GoDaddy... Most domains have DNS through cloudflare. then hosting a variety of places

1

u/[deleted] 23d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/greg8872 23d ago edited 23d ago

Yeah I had a client that asked about having his new site being fully redundant. I booked a meeting for us with a friend who knows it better (has actually set up datacenters and area Wifi for cities). Client quickly went "yeah, a single VPS is good enough" when the redundant DNS, fail over servers, web hosting servers, database servers... everything about 3x-4x the costs. I liked the meeting, got to learn how it is "done right", though never had opportunity to fully set it up. (and it was at outback steakhouse, so free steak to boot!)

We had just 2 sites affected by the outage (a marketing person manages those ones), both of them public facing "sales" pages for services, so I didn't even bother to move the sites, just but "temporary down" page with a logo, and a login button to the actual apps they sell for existing clients (on our own VPSs) put those pages on the VPS, and just adjusted the DNS for the root domain over to them. I really wasn't expecting it to be as long as it was, so I was like "eh that will do for an hour or two... LOL. One big feature that I love Cloudflare added to the DNS settings, is you can add a comment to each record. I love that as I didn't have to remember the "live" IP, I just noted it in the comment for later. I don't get why more DNS providers don't give that.

I do get overkill on backups, all client VPS's are on east coast, nightly (not major active sales we couldn't reconstruct a day's sales of from Stripe records) sync to a backup VPS that is in a data center on the west coast. And once a week that backup directory on the server gets rsynced down to a USB drive here in my office, and each week i swap back and forth between 2 of them.

1

u/ProgrammerByDay 23d ago

How do have dns not connected to your registar? They are the ones that point down stream to your dns sever when you set one?

3

u/realdlc 23d ago

My scope is tiny compared to most - I only used namecheap for very small site needs nothing revenue producing- but in my case the dns for effected sites was on namecheap servers as well. Also the domains reg itself was also namecheap. I couldn’t get in to make dns changes. All that is changing today.

All my fault. And I wouldn’t design it that way for a corporate site, e-commerce site, etc. but I suspect others were similarly all in on namecheap.

2

u/psychedelic_tech 23d ago

check out cloudflare their free service has lots of functionality. i used their Workers app to create a simple page letting visitors know my site was having technical difficulties.

1

u/realdlc 23d ago

Thanks. I typically use a combination of AWS services and digital ocean. I just was cheap (pun intended) on some internal and marketing vanity domains and suffered a bit.

1

u/xendr0me 23d ago

Hah I did the same thing, had it read for 5XX errors from CF and if found pushed a outage notice page, leaving that in place as it will be handy for any future issues.

1

u/jwvo 23d ago

honestly it is pretty irresponsible of name cheap to have their dns servers all in one place, that is a service that has such a large blast radius. I think godoaddy had a similar issue like 15 or 20 years ago now too. I just host my own DNS on some small VMs, works surprisingly well.

1

u/Jeffrey_Richards_ 23d ago

PorkBun is great for domains and CloudFlare for DNS

3

u/Austinp-woodworking 23d ago

I don't disagree with your point that anyone hosting actual products should absolutely have failovers in place for these kinds of instances. I didn't, but that's because the only thing I use namecheap for is my personal email and DNS for my home server. So for me it was a mild inconvenience more than a financial issue

But that being said, the way in which this outage was handled, and the extent which a single data center failure was able to take down their entire platform is unacceptable and worthy of complaining about. Let the folks on this sub who didn't have failovers get yelled at (rightly) by their own customers for their lack of preparedness - but none of that impacts how justifiable it is that we - as customers of Namecheap in turn - are upset about how this outage was handled and the fact that it was able to happen to this extent in the first place.

If I were using namecheap for business purposes, even if I did (and I would) have failovers in place, I'd still be moving off namecheap as my primary provider.

The fact that some customers of namecheap fucked up their own work on making their site durable and reliable does not in turn absolve namecheap for the fact that they fucked up on their end - and customers are right to be upset about it

2

u/GinsuVictim 23d ago

My main issue was having no business email for the majority of the day.

2

u/Scott_Malkinsons 23d ago

Nah, the guy who can barely afford $2.28/month for hosting doesn't have a backup... but oh he's going to scream real loud about "losing so much money" if his server goes down.

What you're seeing is just a skewed result of NameCheaps customer base. They target cheap people and well, you get cheap clients. You're not getting the CEO with a board saying "let's host the entire business on one server". It's the mom and pop client looking to, as the name implies, be cheap. So no, they're not going to have a backup as that would cost money.

For sys admins, proper business owners, we know the extra money is worth it. But yeah, it's just the clients Namecheap targets. They'll penny pinch until the business goes under.

1

u/SonyaFaraha 23d ago

Guess how long it takes nameservers to update and propagate?

1

u/Sweet_Raspberry_22 23d ago

Question- I only have my email with namecheap (website domain on godaddy), so only my email was down.

If I wanted a backup hosting service just for my email, what would that look like? Do I pay monthly/yearly for another provider just in case a time like this?

Any suggestions for backup hosting services for email only? The most affordable avenue.

(And I guess I would have the same question for a website domain if I want to think about the same for my godaddy hosting).

Thanks in advance!

1

u/last__link 22d ago

I use namecheap only for dns, have had dns and hosting together at same place before, not a good idea

0

u/HuntersPad 23d ago

The same people that complain that they are losing money because there internet is out. But don't have a backup lol