Using Wedos hosting and your website suddenly stopped working? It happened to us too

This is not an ordinary article from our workshop. It is more of an experience we want to share, because it could happen, and may be happening right now, to you as well. If you use web hosting from Wedos and your site has stopped working in recent days for no obvious reason, read on. It may not be your fault.

Eight years without a single problem

First things first: we had no problem with Wedos for years. For eight years one of our sites ran reliably on this service and we had no reason to deal with anything. We mention it so it is clear this is not bias or the settling of old scores. Quite the opposite, which is why what happened surprised us all the more.

First came the EWM ads

We have to go back a little. Around the time we launched our own project ePulz.io for website availability monitoring, Wedos began actively reaching out to us about a new service called EWM. It is their own website monitoring tool, which they themselves liken to a warning light on a car dashboard, a little light that alerts you before a problem shows on the outside. In other words, it does essentially the same thing as ePulz.io.

We took it completely normally. Website monitoring is a sensible and necessary thing today, and it is legitimate for a provider to offer it. Nothing odd about that. What got odd was only what came next.

Then came an email about a “protection” we did not want

Into our inbox came a notice that a service called WEDOS Protection, meaning cyber protection, would be activated on our domain. In practice it is a protective layer against attacks that routes the site through the provider’s infrastructure, something like a reverse proxy or a CDN. Part of the activation is also a change of the IP address the site runs on.

There is a catch on two fronts. First, this site is purely presentational, no sensitive services run on it and it does not need such protection at all. Second, the protection activated itself, as a free premium period that the customer would have to cancel on their own. We wrote to them that we did not want it and asked for it to be deactivated.

They promised it would be automatic. It was not

In the notice Wedos clearly promised that the change of IP address including DNS records would happen automatically and that in most cases no action would be needed from the customer.

Reality was different. The DNS change did not happen automatically. The site suddenly stopped responding, because the domain pointed to an IP address on which nothing was running anymore. And here is the spicy part, the IP address that finally worked for us was not even among the ranges Wedos listed in that same email. We had to track it down and rewrite the DNS record by hand, ourselves.

In other words, the promised worry-free automation ended in a downed site and a manual fix.

How we found out within minutes

Because we run our own monitoring tool ePulz.io, we learned about the outage almost immediately. That is exactly the moment when you understand what monitoring is for. Without it, that “worry-free” change would have quietly taken our site offline for who knows how long, perhaps until someone noticed the page was down.

Uncomfortable questions

Here we allow ourselves to move into the realm of opinion and open questions. We do not know what exactly was going on behind the scenes and we are not implying anything to anyone. But a few questions do beg to be asked out loud:

• Why does a paid service the customer never ordered, and has to cancel themselves, activate itself on a presentation site?
• When such a change is being made anyway, why does the promised automation fail in a way that takes the site down and leaves the owner hunting for the working IP address alone?
• And how many other clients had their site quietly go down like this without any idea why?

We write this with a question mark, as an uneasy feeling, not as an accusation. And one more, with or without a smile: is it not at least odd that the company actively selling you a “warning light for your website” is the very one whose own change quietly switched your site off? We leave it to you what to make of that coincidence.

To be fair

To be honest about it. Cyber protection as such makes sense, sites under attack will genuinely appreciate it, and it is good that a provider can offer it. It is equally true that IP addresses in hosting change from time to time for entirely legitimate reasons, during a migration to new hardware or a move of infrastructure. And there is nothing wrong with EWM existing either, monitoring is a useful service.

So the problem is not the existence of the service nor the change of address itself. The problem is activating something the customer never wanted, and doing it in a way where the promised automation fails and the site stops working without warning. A customer who has paid for a service for years deserves at least that the things a company does “for their own good” actually work.

Why website monitoring is essential

This is the main lesson of the whole story. Your website can stop working for reasons entirely beyond your control, and it can happen quietly, even when the provider is “trying to help” you. Without monitoring you find out about an outage only when an angry customer calls or when you realise that not a single order arrived over the weekend.

For a business website or an e-shop, every hour of downtime is a loss of trust and money. That is why anyone who takes their website seriously should keep it under watch today.

And why independent of the hosting

There is one more reason this experience reminded us of. If your monitoring is supplied by the same company that hosts your site and decides on changes to it, it is player and referee at once. That is exactly the case with monitoring from a hosting provider. An independent tool, by contrast, watches your site from the outside, from an ordinary visitor’s point of view, and reliably reports even a problem that arose directly on the hosting side. Precisely the kind of outage we described above.

ePulz.io: independent oversight we built ourselves

We admit it openly, ePulz.io is our own project, so read this article with that in mind too. We built it precisely because we wanted to keep the availability of our sites under control independently of whoever hosts them. It checks sites from several locations, and when something stops working, it alerts you immediately. Thanks to it we knew about our own outage within minutes, not days later from a customer.

If you want monitoring that is not offered to you by the company with the biggest interest in your sites always looking fine, but a tool that is on your side, ePulz.io is exactly that.

Conclusion

If your website on Wedos has stopped working in recent days and you have not found the cause, check whether your domain’s DNS record points to a current and working IP address, and feel free to lean on hosting support while you do. And regardless of who hosts your site, put it under independent watch. So that you are the first to know about any outage, not the last.

This article is part of our guide to Computer networks.