I have several BlueHost and JustHost accounts for me and some sites I manage; they were affected. They are not revenue-producing sites (although working on one that will be), so the downtime was a minor irritant.

But I followed the 'wailing and gnashing of teeth' on the BlueHost FB page, with many complaining about lost revenue, and threatening to move their hosting (to 'punish' BH, I guess).

Although the outage was unfortunate, and certainly not something that anyone wants to happen, it can highligh a lack of thoughtful planning by those with $$-producing sites.

My response to them: if you have a revenue-producing site, then you should have some sort of backup plan in case of site failure. You should have a alternate hosting place, and current 'mirrors' of your site content - static and dynamic. And you should practice your failover plan. You may even need to consider business interruption insurance.

Yes, all of that will cost you some $$. But consider what you may have lost in revenue - and customer goodwill - without that plan. You can whine to the hosting place for refunds or compensation, but the real culprit, I think, is your lack of planning - what I call 'website prepping'.

Harsh, perhaps. But I'd like to see some guidelines on how to handle this kind of outage. (I noticed your site was down also.) It would be a useful article, I think.