“We’re having to migrate everything over to a temporary email server because we don’t want to keep waiting on them to give us an answer as to when it’s going to be resolved.”

Several small businesses and operators of personal websites have contacted The Age / Sydney Morning Herald with similar stories; their site and/or email service disappeared on Thursday and were still not working by Tuesday. Some were primarily concerned that they were losing business or paying for a service they weren’t receiving. With no communication from Crazy Domains, others worried that the servers may have been hacked, potentially putting their and their clients’ information in danger.

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So far, there’s no evidence of anything nefarious at Crazy Domains, which describes the issue on its website as “technical faults”.

Crazy Domains is an inexpensive web hosting service that offers single site packages with up to 100 email addresses for $9 per month, as well as email-only services and domain name registration, maintaining servers in Perth as well as overseas. It is operated by Singapore-based Dreamscape, which was acquired in 2019 by Web.com, a subsidiary of US-based Newfold Digital. Newfold also owns web services brands Bluehost, HostGator, Domain.com, Site Builder and iPage.

The kind of services offered by the company make it attractive to small businesses, and general web users are unlikely to notice this kind of outage as opposed to one affecting Amazon or Twitter. But for companies that rely on their websites and email to bring in work, a five-day outage with little to no communication is a big deal.

“Like many others, as soon as it’s back up and running, we’re going to move everything off them,” Bannister said.

Newfold has been contacted for comment.

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