Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large. 

Squarespace was down. Again

It is just me or is Squarespace a bit unreliable lately? I am currently typing this on Microsoft Word because the entirety of Squarespace is down, and I have no access to the main portal (I usually type these short blogs on the portal itself; the wordier stuff like the GT3 diaries are typed on Word before exporting). Needlessly to say, my website itself is currently unavailable, too.

It’s quite frustrating.

Not to say my personal website is of any real significance in the grand scheme of the Internet, but this is unacceptable, right? For a web hosting company to be down for any reason, much less at the frequency Squarespace has been experiencing trouble lately. Just a few weeks back, photo hosting was malfunctioning, preventing me from uploading pictures, which for my purposes is largely what my website is based on, so that situation is far from ideal.

I’m sure there are much larger and more important websites being hosted by Squarespace that can’t suffer to be offline for any period. I think the company needs to seriously reevaluate the stability of its platform if it wants to keep growing and sort of take a chunk of the marketplace dominated by Amazon S3. Remember when that suffered an outage back in 2017? Seemingly half the websites I frequent were inaccessible. That was the only time I could remember S3 being out significantly, and if Squarespace wants to play in that arena, the rate it’s been offline lately is not going cut it.

Small-time freelancers who are dependent on their Squarespace-hosted sites to make a living simply can’t afford to have any downtime. And it isn’t like Squarespace is some basic entry-level platform: we’re paying over $200 dollars per year for an account, and I think it’s only fair that we should have 100 percent uptime in return. These are prime content creating and earning hours of a workday, and not being able to access our websites is an intolerable hindrance.

Perhaps Squarespace should spend less money advertising 10% discounts with creators on YouTube (full disclosure: I did use one of the freely available coupon codes for my first year) and instead move some resources towards ensuring complete service uptime. As the cliché goes: I’m not mad, just disappointed.

Watching the night games.