InMotion hosting server failure


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The InMotion hosting suffered a major hardware failure on Monday, December 13, 2021. The point of failure was the RAID array, ie the hard drives. The current state is that the servers are restored with the most recent backups.

InMotion server failure

The server failure seems to have affected only one server, the affected server being named, ecbiz213.

If your website is up and running, this outage does not affect your site at all.

Customer reviews of InMotion hosting

InMotion has been on Twitter to respond to customer comments. However, some report that they have not received a notification.

It is possible that the hosting email accounts are linked to the downed server, in which case no support email would be received.

A customer, Jason B. from Logos-Daily.com (@Logos_Daily) shared their experience:

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“I haven’t received any notifications from InMotion Hosting, and they publicly share mixed details about what happened (‘unscheduled maintenance’ if you visit their status page, ‘hardware malfunction’ if you chat with them in private …).

All the information I received I had to dig to find out.

I didn’t even know my sites were down until someone contacted me and let me know the website was not working.

Come and find out, we are not even sure we can recover all the sites (says their support).

Another InMotion customer shared a similar story on Twitter:

To their credit, InMotion Hosting has been proactive on Twitter by responding to customer concerns as they arise.

According to InMotion hosting:

“We regret to inform you that at 12:30 pm EST on Monday, December 13, 2021, ecbiz213 experienced a major hardware failure associated with the hard drives on the server.

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Despite our team’s best efforts, the RAID array was deemed unrecoverable.

InMotion today updated their support page to note that they were able to locate more up-to-date backups, which is good news.

This means that they will be able to restore websites hopefully to the very latest versions.

Website backups

It’s always a good idea to have a backup handy for precisely this reason. While a web host usually keeps backups of their hard drives, it is definitely recommended that they keep a daily or weekly backup.

Even for relatively static websites, it is still recommended that you back up the website daily, as these backups will come in handy in the event of a hack, which will restore a site to a state prior to the hack event and from there, fix all the vulnerabilities present, to prevent the hack from recurring.

Hard drives tend to fail

I administer my own server and have received these notifications in the past regarding disk sector errors, which indicates that the disk is starting to fail. In these situations, I ask for disk replacements before they fail, having learned my lesson from previous failures.

Hard drive failures are inevitable on servers and for this reason it is important to keep an eye on the performance of the drive. Normally, there is a server monitor that can detect and report disk errors that precede a full disk merge.

InMotion had them in place, but somehow no proactive action could be taken before the failure.

According to an InMotion spokesperson:

“InMotion Hosting engineers actively monitor the health of all drives using a variety of checks and replace them as soon as they show symptoms of impending failure.

In addition to leveraging software like Icinga to monitor drives, we also have an onsite data center team that manages our hardware, allowing us to act quickly and replace drives.

Patience is the best answer

Switching to a new server can be very complicated and can sometimes cause rank fluctuations.

In a case like this, there is no reason to switch to another server. A spokesperson for InMotion noted that all customer websites are currently being restored.

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“To date, the systems team is working to locate more up-to-date backups on the server for our customers.

They are currently in the process of verifying restores on the server and ensuring that the most up-to-date backups are the ones restored. Our Systems team will restore the accounts from the most recent backups we have on file as soon as possible. “

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Read the InMotion incident report

ecbiz213 Failure and recovery


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