If you are a WPX Hosting user, you know well about the downtime you faced a few days back. However, those looking to migrate their WordPress website to WPX are now thinking about switching to WPX or finding another WordPress hosting. As a result, even some WPX users searched for WPX alternatives.
But before making any explanation, we can say that you don’t have to switch to a new hosting service due to the downtime of WPX. And those who are looking to buy the WPX hosting, you can migrate your website without any doubt.
Why is WPX Still Worth it even after the Downtime?
I am also a WPX user who experienced the big 5 hours downtime but decided to use the service even afterward. So here I am explaining my experience with them, including the WPX downtime.
I still recommend WPX because, the fact that downtime can happen to any hosting, and WPX doesn’t have any exception. How a service provider handles the situation and tries to overcome them in the future is more important.
I switched to WPX a few months back after seeing some of the great recommendations from bloggers. I was looking for the best hosting service for my website. Even saw some high traffic website like BloggersPassion explained their 5 years experience with WPX. Those positive points made us switch from my previous hosting to WPX.
Seriously, my experience with WPX was great, and the website’s speed also improved much better after the switch. WPX is always marketed as the fastest WordPress hosting. That is correct, and there is no doubt regarding the speed.
But in the first week of August, unexpectedly, almost all the websites that used the WPX servers faced a downtime. So, initially, everyone, including us, thought it was some issue with our website. But, it was not. So, we tried to check WPX’s main website to contact the support. But unfortunately, WPX’s main website was also not working.
We headed over to the Twitter page and Facebook page to check whether it was a global issue, but we couldn’t find any information. After a few minutes, WPX users started commenting on one of the latest posts available on the Facebook Page. So everyone was complaining about the downtime.
So, then it was clear that it was a global issue from the WPX server, and we didn’t receive any update regarding the downtime. You can check their Facebook page for all those conversations. For the next few hours, all the communications support from WPX was through the Facebook page, and they informed us that the issue was due to a switch complaint from one of the providers.
Even though it went more than expected, thankfully, the website was live a few hours after fixing the issue.
What went wrong, and Why WPX Failed to Handle the Situation?
Initially, we said that downtime could happen to any hosting service. Yes, it can happen, but downtime of more than 1-2 hours is not good. So, a downtime for more than 5 hours from a premium WordPress posting that charges more than $20 per month can’t be accepted.
So, it is a fact that it should have never gone that long. They should have fixed it within 1-2 hours maximum. So, what happened here is WPX never expected a downtime like that and never thought about a backup plan in this type of crisis.
Some of the points that caused this issue worse in the case of WPX
Their performance was excellent in the past years without any black marks, so they never thought of this type of situation and how to handle it.
The subsequent big failure from WPX was communication. WPX didn’t inform their users about the downtime on time and started responding on Facebook only after complaining about the issue.
The big mistake done by WPX here is they hosted the same customer support website on the same data center, and it too went down, and they don’t have any way other than social media to handle the user’s queries.
WPX used to take the entire daily backup of the website and store them for up to 28 days. But those backups also went unusable here. Moreover, since they hosted their client panel also went down due to the issue. So WPX customers could not take them.
The other one was the way they informed the issue to their users. The issue happened due to the switch complaint from their data center provider and directly not from the WPX side. But initially, they informed the users that the issue was not with WPX, and they completely blamed the third party providing for the issue.
Since WPX users pay for the service to WPX and only know them, third-party involvement and blaming should be avoided. Instead, they should have taken responsibility.
Why I decided to stay with WPX
I decided to stay with WPX due to their service and transparency. Yes, they failed in handling the issue due to improper planning. But they realized them soon and admitted that they failed in some areas, improving in the future.
The next day, WPX stated their blog post about the outage, and there they admitted everything that happened.
We liked that they never tried to convince us and demanded we stay with them. They ultimately admitted all the failures and lifted the 30-day money-back policy so that WPX users could cancel their subscription, and WPX was willing to refund the remaining amount. On the other hand, they offer compensation also if we stay with them.
Initially, I decided to demand a refund. But, downtime happened, and WPX was never prepared for such a situation. So now, they know all their weakness and can perform much better in the coming days.
So, I decided to stay with them. But if the same situation happens again, we don’t have to think again and look for an alternative. But hoping that won’t happen and WPX will keep their words.
So, accepting all the negatives that happened with the service. Still, I love to see my website loading faster with WPX Hosting. So, I am still recommending WPX if you are looking for faster-managed WordPress hosting.
What we expect from WPX Hosting After the Downtime
- They should need to work on some backup plan for all these types of issues. Even if there is no issue, always keep a plan to act immediately.
- They should work on the redundancy. Should have to ready-to-go backup system to make a switch within a few hours.
- Must change the client management platform and the user’s website backups to a completely different data server.
- Email hosting should be isolated from the website hosting so that both services won’t go down together.
- Finally, never blame the third-party provider if something happens. Instead, take responsibility because, as a user, we are paying to WPX, and we don’t know the third-party provider you are relying on. So it is your responsibility to choose the right provider.
What we can take as backup plan from our side
Along with other websites, we also experienced downtime. But we reduced the impact since we got our website backup files and immediately set a temporary hosting service and pointed our website to that hosting. Once WPX was normal, we pointed again to WPX.
To do that, we recommend the following.
- Always keep your domain registrar and hosting with separate providers. If kept both together, you can’t change the name server in such a crisis.
- Also, it is better to set up Cloudflare CDN (DNS only) and always use the Cloudflare name server for your domain. The good thing here is if you set the name servers as with the Cloudflare name server, there is no need to update the name server each time you change the hosting.
- Change the IP address of the new hosting provider from Cloudflare DNS settings, and your website will immediately switch to the new hosting service. No, wait for the name server propagation. This helped us. Since we used Cloudflare, we logged into Cloudflare and changed the IP address with a new IP address, and our website switched to new hosting.
- Even though your hosting provider is offering daily backup, it is recommended to take the backup manually to the local machine or any cloud storage in some regular intervals to have the backup personally with you.
- If possible, keep any low-cost backup hosting server (shared hosting) so that you can set up temporary hosting to avoid such long downtime.
We followed the above backup plan and thus helped reduce the impact. But, of course, there might be other solutions too, and it depends.
Conclusion
Here we shared our experience so that it can help users. However, admitting all these facts, we still recommend WPX and love its speed and performance.
Issues and problems can happen to anyone, and the important thing is how they accept it, how they managed to overcome it, and how they perform after learning from that. So we are sure that WPX understood all their weaker sides, which can help them perform even better.
