this is spacemail loginp age as of 14th august, at midnight.
from what i can see, it seems like a huge portion of their data center is like it’s been set on fire. or to say it more politely, under emergency. multiple services they offer seem to currently be offline, including the most important one to me - emails. thankfully, their DNS is not down, so my website is still functioning. but to be honest, it wouldn’t surprise me id DNS goes down too, one day. hopefully not today. i’m not sure how big the problem is when the whole thing has been down for over 10 hours. I’ve never seen an outage this long on spaceship infra. but i guess there’s a first for everything.
i equally blame them and myself. its clear that their service is a single point of failure, but self-hosting emails is complex and doesn’t solve SPOF, and having multiple mailservers is simply impractical for a small personal website like mine. so what could’ve i even done? it seems like this was unexpected even for the spaceship technicians. i just hope they can figure out a fix soon, because, i am, hopefully understandably so, kinda annoyed. but it will be okay. it has to be!
i do not have any source, but from what I’ve read in passing, this is a planned maintenance turned unplanned. so shit went to, well, shit. other stuff such as their hosting, that is allegedly down. i cant check, because i don’t use it, doesn’t make a problem to me. but email does. i need my emails. I’ve always thought spaceship, being an offshoot of namecheap is a good mailhost to choose, and up until this point of time, i had nothing but praise. but then again, i can’t be too mad. in the IT infra, shit happens, when you expect it the least. and im sure the technicians are working their butts, to fix this issue. but yet again, i am annoyed i cannot access my email. when you’re online, if there is no access to email, its exactly as your communications channels were severed. which is, not fun. not fun in the slightest.
SPOF
it is a single point of failure in its truest form. but not one that could’ve been reasonably avoided. mailhosts, although inexpensive, still cost money. having multiple mainhosts is truly unreasonable in my opinion. but the problem is that they, themselves don’t have backup channels. im in my late 20s, I’ve been online since early childhood. i’ve never experienced a mailhost going down like this. gmail was never down for this long, neither was Hotmail. and ironically neither was our ISPs mailserver in 2000s. my dad uses that specific one quite a bit. so i truly think, a PAID mailhost going down like this should be unacceptable. while i am, again, trying to be reasonable, i am very annoyed.
today, i woke up, decided to check my email, only to realize its completely fucked. not fun. thank motherfucking lord, this isn’t tied to an actual business, but to my stupid shitty blog. i don’t even wanna imagine how much money serious projects have lost, because the email is unavailable.
so, the sweet irony is, it seems like, a FREE mail provider is better than a PAID one, like i said, i’ve never seen gmail go down like this lol.
complaints, complaints, and some more complaints
its not just me thought. under their status tweet, people are absolutely dogpiling on them. which is honestly, at least somewhat understandable. because according to their post themselves “As a follow-up to the ongoing incident on August 13, we would like to inform you that BTCPay payments have been restored on Spaceship.”, and at least one of the replies, they’re prioritizing fixing payment errors, rather than taking care of their existing customers who cannot access shit:
this was posted over 6 hours ago, as i write this, and the infra (mail, hosting, etc) are still broken. kinda embarrassing i can’t lie. payments aren’t as important as fixing your infrastructure that’s obviously on fucking fire. don’t you think that should be your priority? i guess not. sad.
i don’t know how deep this goes on their end, but it seems like they’re in some deep shit, so i cant know how much of their infrastructure is genuinely on fire right now, but its not fun, and things look genuinely beyond fucked. i’m gonna play some overwatch, and than sleep. hopefully but the time i wake up this shit will be fixed. if it isn’t fixed, spaceship will really fall in my eyes.