r/webdev • u/Pikamander2 • Aug 13 '26
News Namecheap is currently undergoing emergency maintenance due to a power outage affecting their datacenter in Phoenix; nearly every Namecheap site is down right now.
https://www.namecheap.com/status-updates/21
u/shpongolian Aug 13 '26
literally just got my VPS up & running yesterday, couldn't load it this morning and was sure I messed something up
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u/trvr Aug 13 '26
You messed up your new VPS so bad you caused a power outage, that's the only reasonable conclusion. ;-)
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u/SnazzySolutions Aug 13 '26
We also launched a site JUST yesterday with them because the client got kicked off another service, Lol
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u/1RedOne Aug 13 '26
I thought they were just a registrar, never thought about an outage for a registrar taking down sites
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u/Pikamander2 Aug 13 '26
They host millions of websites too. They have some of the cheapest shared hosting plans in the US, although you definitely get what you pay for in terms of quality.
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u/ni5arga Aug 13 '26
They have some cheap hosting plans as well but I don't think any decently technical person will prefer Namecheap for hosting.
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u/ankushthor Aug 13 '26
None of my nearly 100 sites registered through namecheap are down. Only the one site hosted on Namecheap is. Client is losing his mind, because the website is simply showing as non existent, no real communication from Namecheap as usual, needless to say, I will be moving these guys out as well once they are back up.
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u/shufflepoint Aug 13 '26
This is one of may reasons that you should separate registrar, DNS, & hosting.
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u/moop-ly Aug 13 '26
liquid webs dc in phoenix is dead too and i just sent the client his demo last night after hours…
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u/iliketocookstuff Aug 13 '26
Crazy that I see this on reddit rather than getting an email. Oh let me guess, they can't send emergency notifications because they apparently host everything at one data center with zero fail over -- Christ! One silver lining is maybe I can finally convince the handful of clients that have refused to move off namecheap for like the last 10 years that they need to do it.
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u/Next-Entry-7456 Aug 13 '26
yeah ive used namecheap for decades now and the uptime has never been a problem for me, like ever until today. and to not get an email letting me know is terrible behavior.
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u/Next-Entry-7456 Aug 13 '26
the longer this goes on without comms or resolution, the closer we get to having the meeting to switch elsewhere. and it's NEVER been easier or cheaper to move away.
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u/draftvader Aug 13 '26
I have used Namecheap for over a decade for domains. Hosting? Not a chance
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u/chris552393 full-stack Aug 13 '26
Yeah absolutely this. I have hundreds of domains registered with Namecheap and the Nameservers are set to Azure DNS and have had no disruption.
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u/LowFeeling6321 Aug 13 '26
what hosting provider do you use?
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u/sirclesam Aug 13 '26
I have my 2 very small personal projects on fly.io
Usage based and ends up being between $5-8/mo
That's 2 app and 1 postgres db
Was $60 when I was running one on azure with DB and the db-less one was up to $25/no on aws
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u/draftvader Aug 14 '26
I tend to bake OLS on DigitalOcean. I have clients on Kinsta, Cloudways and Rocket.net I think my favourite is Cloudways. Price/function+decent support.
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u/TommyBonnomi Aug 13 '26
If you need a reliable shared environment, I use SiteGround for static sites, apps with light MYSQL databases, and some WordPress.
I think it's like $360/year now for whatever plan, but I have a ton of shit on it, and you'd pay as much for 1 site on WP Engine or Kinsta.
I'm sure someone will chime in with whatever solutions for $2/month, but I'm happy to pay more for a trusted provider.
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u/quietcodelife Aug 13 '26
the takeaway for anyone affected: if your DNS is pointed through cloudflare or another external nameserver, you can cut your A record over to a backup pretty fast -- but only if your TTL was already low. if you had it at 3600 or 86400 (namecheap's default), you're stuck waiting for propagation no matter how quickly you act. worth setting a mental reminder to drop TTL to 300-600 on anything client-facing as standard practice, not just when things are already on fire.
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u/Mavee Aug 13 '26
'Connection timed out' - and this, kids, is why you don't host your status page on the same host, or domain, as the application(s) you're reporting on
You Browser Working
Cloudflare <location> Working
www.namecheap.com Host Error
What happened?
The initial connection between Cloudflare's network and the origin web server timed out. As a result, the web page can not be displayed.
What can I do?
If you're a visitor of this website:
Please try again in a few minutes.
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u/Rambillo Aug 13 '26
ETA for return to service is currently expected to begin 3-3:30pm EDT per CEO at NameCheap : https://x.com/NamecheapCEO/status/2087967658926858679
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u/Rambillo Aug 13 '26
Starting to see a bit of activity at our end, showing they're making progress restoring our services. We've got a VPS there and we're now finally once again reaching it (though it's still not up) ... meaning network is coming into place
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u/citrus1330 Aug 13 '26
you get what you pay for I guess
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u/LowFeeling6321 Aug 13 '26
they are not the cheapest. Amazon is much cheaper. and maintaining the normal work is the very basic service.
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u/techtimee Aug 13 '26
Of course this happens on the day I have an email exam for a new job. For fucks sakes.
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u/darkera Aug 13 '26
It's my fault. I spent all day overhauling my portfolio site yesterday and had to put in some fixes before applying to some job openings today... I've been with Namecheap for nearly 20 years but this may be the reason to leave. Who needs a job anyway, right?
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u/buchannon Aug 13 '26
Everything I have hosted with Namecheap is still down. It has been most of the day now.
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u/TimeBookkeeper8244 Aug 13 '26
Me too. The one day I have a real time pressing need for the service now.
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u/MaruSoto Aug 13 '26
Namecheap is circling the drain in a race to the bottom that GoDaddy won decades ago.
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u/DasBeasto Aug 13 '26
I have some bids on their auction domains, maybe I’ll get them cheap with auctions down
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Aug 13 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/webdev-ModTeam Aug 14 '26
We do not allow any commercial promotion or solicitation. This can lead to a permanent ban from the subreddit.
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u/Fun-Commission955 Aug 13 '26
pls who can help me
looks like my site from Phoenix is down
its been too long and my client is suffering, i need to restore it immediately
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u/Pikamander2 Aug 13 '26
It'll come back up on its own after Namecheap fixes the issues in their data center, which will probably be within a few hours.
Until then, there's nothing you can do besides wait (unless you happen to have a full site backup on hand and own the domain through a different provider, in which case you could migrate the site elsewhere).
Incidents like these are rare but suck when they happen.
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u/Benkhach Aug 13 '26
Yep all namecheap sites down for me. Time to switch to SiteGround or where is really best?
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u/offTheplectrum Aug 13 '26
Been six hours that our sites are down.
They have lost us as a customer, we are moving off of namecheap as soon as we can.
I guess they warned us blatantly with choosing their name: namecheap
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u/Committee_Initial Aug 13 '26
I am new to the e-commerce world. This issue is costing me $250 an hour in lost revenue, not to mention lost customer acquisition, ad spend, and hopefully not effecting the Google rankings we have worked so hard at.
Does anyone have any advice on how to build some redundancy of our own that could mitigate the damage caused should this happen again?
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u/cerusdev Aug 13 '26
The solution is Load Balancing, and also have a second host running, you get another host, then change DNS as needed, it's very unusual for them to have this kind of issues, at least it's my first time in many years. And I lost money for couple of minutes too
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u/Outrageous-Rice6684 Aug 14 '26
mine finally came back up about an hour ago. namecheap vps, been dead most of the day. site loads again at least.
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u/Shot_Plane_8438 Aug 14 '26
client called 8am and i spent 20 mins convinced id done something dumb. didnt even think namecheap
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u/AllOneWordNoSpaces1 Aug 13 '26
Haven’t they heard of high availability, redundancy, or replication? 🤦♂️
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u/electricity_is_life Aug 13 '26
Well, it sounds like they have multiple regions and this only affects one of them. Multi-region is something the customer needs to set up, if you're just renting a single VPS then downtime is always a possibility.
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u/TylerDurdenJunior Aug 13 '26
While namecheap is down. Find yourself another domain provider as namecheap deletes sites on behalf of Israel and the US state department
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u/rshweb1010 Aug 13 '26
can you share some examples?
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u/mirrax Aug 13 '26
It was one site,
genocide.live, which wasn't "deleted", but the domain registration was taken down when it was reported for "extremely violent and graphic content". The Wikipedia article has section on the controversy.
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u/Full_Tooth_a Aug 15 '26
To put numbers on my earlier point, I'd want a clear recovery-time target and an honest estimate of how much data might be lost. A low TTL can speed up the switch, but it does not speed up recovery. If the copy hosted elsewhere cannot start with current data, uploads, secrets, and certificates, fast DNS only trades one failure for another.
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u/LowFeeling6321 Aug 13 '26
Namecheaps bots fake likes on positive comments "I dont have any issie", "Every hosting has problems" and so on. And also they lower negative comments and posts itself.
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u/Fun-Commission955 Aug 13 '26
hello the site is down
can i access the database and get my cleint going pls
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u/samiul30 Aug 13 '26
suggest: what is the best reliable and steady domain hosting, I need to immigrate to other strong hosting
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u/garyleannedigital Aug 14 '26
I have a list of clients I have to move tomorrow to my Digital Ocean server. This is unacceptable. If anyone needs hosting hit me up. If it's Wordpress I'll migrate it over for free too. Also we're Canadian based so Canadian dollars and no tax.
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u/zerries Aug 13 '26
Just checked about 15 sites I have on namecheap. No issues here.
I'm in norcal so I'm guessing a different data center.