Effective today, Hover Status is completely off-network. That means our complete status notification system is on separate servers, uses an external DNS provider and doesn’t rely on any Hover services to operate.
From time to time, like any web service, we run into issues that cause disruptions in service that affect our customers. Getting up-to-date information about the status of Hover Services is really important since we know that you depend on our services like DNS and email.
Off-network is a good thing
Over the past couple of months, we’ve been the target of at least one distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that not only took customer sites offline, but also took down our own Hover Status site.
That’s not good at all, so last month we started the work to move Hover Status completely off our network so it will stay up in the event that something like a major DDoS attack targets us again.
One of the things that needed to happen to get off the network was to switch the URL from http://status.hover.com to http://hoverstatus.com so we could switch over to use an alternate DNS provider for that domain.
Additionally, rather than having a WordPress-based site hosted on our own servers, we moved to a purpose-built, third-party status tool that is hosted in multiple data centers around the world.
The net result is a better status site that will provide more information during any disrutions in service. Being off-network means it will stay up even when something like a massive DDoS attack targets our network.
Update your Bookmarks!
You should continue to follow @HoverStatus on Twitter if you want realtime notifications of any issues – there’s no change there. For the time being, we’ve forwarded the old http://status.hover.com URL to the new site at http://hoverstatus.com. You should update any bookmarks or links you have to that old site since that URL forward is still on our network and could go down.
While we don’t like to have to use the Hover Status site, it is a necessity for online services as disruptions do happen from time to time. Having a site that is completely off-network allows us to provide the best information possible to our customers.
