Yet Another Reason Why MDDHosting is Awesome

At around 3 am EST yesterday, my brother and I were working on one of our sites when we experienced sudden slowness. We couldn’t publish articles, we couldn’t update pages, we couldn’t do anything productive at all. This was very unusual so we decided to wait it out a bit. A couple minutes passed and we were going to check again but to our surprise, the site was down! In fact, we found out all the sites in our account (including Review Hell) were down!

We contacted MDDHosting‘s support team to ask what was going on. Their level 1 techs told us there were networking issues and they were working on it, but unfortunately they didn’t have an ETA yet. At first there weren’t many updates from them and we found this to be odd, especially because we were used to receiving responses from them within minutes. Two hours passed and the sites were still down. We decided to temporarily move some of our sites and a few of our clients’ critical sites to a hosting account we have with another provider just so we could be back up.

Another hour passed and the sites we didn’t move were still down, but thankfully we received an update from Michael Denney (MDDHosting owner). He said the server/IP we were on was under a large DDoS attack. Everything made sense then — there was no reason to be down for a long time unless it was something disruptive such as a DDoS. We felt relieved that Mike and his team were now working on it, and as expected, the issue was resolved fairly quickly — about an hour after his update. We then moved all our sites back to our MDDHosting account.

The sites were back up for a good while until around 11 pm EST when the same large attack hit the new IP we were on. This time, Mike and his team were immediately on it so the downtime only lasted for an hour. Of course downtime is never good, whether it lasts for a couple minutes or many hours. But considering we were under a “large” DDoS attack (I don’t exactly know how large it was), I imagine our sites could have possibly been down for at least a day if we were with another provider.

No host is perfect and we’re all bound to experience issues at some point. But we can almost always determine just how good a host is when complex problems occur. While it’s rare to have issues with MDDHosting, Mike and his team’s level of dedication was very much apparent during the unfortunate situation we were in. I am very grateful to be with a web host who’s proactive in assisting their clients and solving big issues such as this. This is one of the reasons why I recommend MDDHosting to my friends and clients.

I have to admit we were a bit frustrated because of the lack of updates during the first few hours when only their level 1 techs were working on the issue. For some reason, their techs didn’t notify the management of the attack, so initially things were delayed. Mike apologized for this and assured us it won’t happen again in the future. Obviously we felt reassured and lucky at the same time. We know our sites are in good hands and the MDDHosting team will always do their best to take care of us.