Small businesses were taken offline when Crazy Domains went down

“We have to migrate everything to a temporary email server because we don’t want to keep waiting for them to give us an answer as to when the issue will be resolved.”

Several small businesses and personal website operators have been in touch The Age / Sydney Morning Herald with similar stories; Their website and/or email service disappeared on Thursday and was still not working as of Tuesday. Some were primarily concerned that they would lose business or pay for a service they didn’t get. With no communication from Crazy Domains, others feared the servers might have been hacked, potentially putting their and their customers’ information at risk.

Loading

So far, there has been no evidence of anything nefarious from Crazy Domains, which describes the issue as “technical glitches” on its website.

Crazy Domains is a low-cost web hosting service that offers single-site plans with up to 100 email addresses for $9 per month, as well as email-only services and domain name registration, and has servers in both Perth and overseas . It is operated by Singapore-based Dreamscape, which was acquired in 2019 by Web.com, a subsidiary of US company Newfold Digital. Newfold also owns the web services brands Bluehost, HostGator, Domain.com, Site Builder and iPage.

The nature of the services the company offers makes it attractive to small businesses, and general internet users are unlikely to notice this type of outage, unlike an outage that affects Amazon or Twitter. But for businesses that rely on their websites and email to get work, a five-day downtime with little to no communication is a big deal.

“Like many others, we will remove all of them as soon as they are operational again,” Bannister said.

Newfold was contacted for comment.

Get news and reviews on technology, gadgets and games every Friday with our technology newsletter. Sign up here.

Comments are closed.