Well, as I go through day four of site downtime, I have to say thanks to HostGator for the reminder of how not to do business, lol.

I completely understand that webhosts will occasionally experience issues, sometimes even on a catastrophic level.

How a business handles these types of failures probably gives the absolute best insight as to where there priorities truly are.

In this case, the issues are primarily affecting those of us using reseller accounts. Fortunately for me, I only use the reseller account for my own sites and do not resell and host clients on them.

My heart truly goes out to those who actually have the misfortune of hosting their own clients via the reseller package at HG.

As soon as things went south on October 29, HostGator should have immediately notified their reseller account holders that there were issues so that they could proactively contact their own clients.

This would have reduced both financial damage and damage to the reputations of those resellers affected.

Instead, HG did the minimum required and posted fairly unhelpful updates to their forums and social media accounts.

This led to resellers have to be reactive to irate clients instead of being able to proactively inform their clients that there was trouble. Many of these resellers are going to take a much bigger hit than the meager amount of a monthly service credit that HG will provide.

Here are a few of the lessons learned(or lessons we are reminded of):

• Always make backups to your sites when you make changes. HG has restored 10 out of 14 sites I have, but they are backups from 10/25/14. Personally, I didn't lose any data that can't be easily redone, but many have.
• If you are doing business with people who do business, make sure you notify them if there is any chance issues you are having might impact their business. This proactive action can save everyone's reputation, save clients and, minimize damage to revenue.
• Always have an escape plan. If you have current backups and your webhost goes down for an extended period of time, you could easily migrate to another host if necessary.
• Keep on top of your business. Know what's going on, always. There are plenty of tools out there to monitor site downtime, find dead links, etc. Keep an eye on your affiliate relationships so you aren't promoting affiliate programs that are deactivated at the networks or aren't converting well.

This catastrophe at HostGator is a great reminder that we all need to keep our focus on our customers needs, especially when we are running into problems that may affect them.

Good luck to anybody that is still being affected by the HG outage.