Webspacebar Hosting Company offline

The Web Space Bar said:
Hi Jaybee,


Please reach out to us on our WhatsApp chat number: +27 68 616 4676.

Let me assure you that we aren’t “fly-by-night.” We’ve been hosting websites since 2011 because we truly love what we do and care deeply about our customers. I’m the owner of WebSpaceBar, and I want to be transparent with you, I haven’t slept since Saturday. Knowing our customers are offline keeps me awake.

I didn’t build this business from nothing just to go down without a fight over this storage failure. People are saying a lot of hurtful things about us and our team, but they don’t know who we are or how much we’ve poured into this company.

I’m not just a business owner, I’m a father, a husband, and a geek who loves helping people. Yes, I’m angry about the storage outage too. But giving up isn’t an option. I’ve never stolen a cent from anyone. Those who have worked with us before know that we’ve often helped people at 2 AM with WordPress plugin issues, domain renewals, upgrades, etc.

This past week has been a nightmare, but we didn’t take it lying down. New hardware has already been purchased, and restores began immediately. We expected to have everyone back online much sooner, but the old storage is painfully slow, transferring even a single gigabyte takes hours.


So here I am, say what you will, I’ll take it. I’m human. I care. And I’ll keep fighting for every customer because that’s who I am and what WebSpaceBar stands for.
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I don't have any horse in this race, but just as an outside observer it is good to see you replying quickly to criticisms in a level headed manner even though I can imagine it is absolute chaos in your environment at the moment.

Definitely a very refreshing sight to see. Hopefully you guys get everything back up and running and do not suffer too much of a reputation hit for this
 
Thank you for your message and for being transparent about what’s happening. I can imagine how stressful the past week has been, and I do understand the pressure you’re under. I appreciate that you’re working to get everyone back online.


That said, please remember we are all business owners here, not just you. Our websites and emails being offline impacts our customers, our reputation, and our bottom line just as heavily as this outage impacts you. The lack of communication has made the situation far worse for us...a simple email update would have gone a long way. Since your auto-responses are still coming through, it’s clear the email database is intact, so it would have been possible to reach everyone quickly.


And if I can offer some constructive feedback: in the past, support has sometimes come across as unfriendly or abrupt and in some cases very condescending. In a crisis, people are more forgiving if they feel they’re being treated with warmth and kept in the loop. Clearer and more personable communication could really help you retain customers in the long run. I hope you take this into consideration when answering support queries in the future.


I appreciate the work you’re doing to get us restored and hope services stabilize soon.
 
Hi Jaybee,

Thank you so much for your message, and for the way you said it, calmly, fairly, and with understanding. I really appreciate that.

You’re absolutely right. Communication should have been better. Between trying to keep servers online, coordinating restores, and dealing with the storage disaster, I dropped the ball on updates. That’s on me, and I’m truly sorry for that. A short email to everyone would have helped ease some of the panic, and you’re right, that should’ve been done. Our client database was on the same storage, which is silly of me. To put it lightly. The entire billing platform had its own vm on that kit. Learn from my mistakes.

What you said about support also hits home. I’ve seen it myself at times, when the pressure gets high, replies can come across a bit too short or abrupt. I completely understand how it feels on the other side. We’re going to work on that, properly. People deserve to feel heard and helped, especially when things go wrong.

This week has been brutal, but hearing feedback like yours really helps me see what we can do better. Thank you again for the message and for still giving us a chance to make this right. I won’t forget it.

As soon as we have more news about the recovery process we will post updates on Whatsapp as well as here.
 
Good afternoon,

We’re finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel, and I can’t tell you how much we appreciate everyone who’s stuck with us through this. I’ll be honest, by the time this is over, I’ll probably be older, grayer, and a lot more tired… but also a lot wiser.

We just got off the phone with the data center, and they’ve confirmed that things should start stabilizing around 2 AM tomorrow morning. We’ll be awake and online through the night, testing as each server comes back up and making sure everyone’s sites and emails are working properly.

Here’s what’s happening in plain terms:
They’ve connected cache drives to the storage system to speed things up.

To make the copying process faster, they’ve shut down all the virtual machines for now, if they were left running, it would take more than twelve hours per host instead of two or three. Each machine is being moved off the slow network storage and onto fast SSD drives inside the Proxmox servers. Once a host finishes copying, it’s started up again, and performance immediately improves.

After everything is back up, we’ll test speeds. If everything runs smoothly, we’ll leave it on the new SSD setup to avoid any more disruption. If anyone still finds things too slow, we’ll move the data to the NVMe setup we’ve already prepared and paid for.

We know this downtime has been brutal, not just for us, but for you especially. We live in an online world, and being offline isn’t acceptable. I want you to know that no one takes this more seriously than we do. We feel it just as much as you do, and we’re doing everything possible to get you back online and running better than before.

Thank you for your patience, your kindness, and for being with us through this. We see you, we care, and we’re not stopping until this is fixed.

Warm regards,
Webspacebar Team
 
The Web Space Bar said:
Good morning everyone,


First and foremost, we want to extend our sincere apologies for the recent downtime and lack of communication. We completely understand the frustration and concern this situation has caused.


To clarify, we have been reachable via WhatsApp, and we’re doing our best to assist everyone as quickly as possible.


Our hosting infrastructure runs on Proxmox with network-attached storage, and unfortunately, the underlying storage array suffered a severe performance failure earlier this week. This directly impacted all hosted services including our own website and has caused extreme delays across the environment.


The good news is that new hardware has already been brought online, and we are currently in the process of:
  • Restoring accounts from JetBackup
  • Synchronizing mail data using rsync (which is very slow due to the storage degradation)
  • Verifying data integrity before bringing sites back online

We are working around the clock to bring everyone’s services back as safely and quickly as possible.


If your website or email is still offline, please send us a private message here or contact us via WhatsApp with:
  • Your domain name(s)
  • The email address linked to your hosting account

This will allow us to prioritize your restore and keep you updated individually.


We deeply appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding during this time. The situation is being treated with the utmost urgency and care.


Warm regards,
The WebSpaceBar Team
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Websites are still down and out
 
Good afternoon beyondcctv, please whatsapp on 27686164676. The data center is busy moving the vm's off the storage,
they turn off all the servers because the difference in disk i/o is 3 hours to 12 hours for one export (with all the servers started the disk i/o is dead in the water),
the first server has been completed and online, da01.
da02 extract started now and we estimate it to come up at around 9pm.
 
Hey guys, I think we need to cut The Web Space Bar some slack.

They have clearly explained the issue now, sincerely apologized, and are doing what they can to make up for it.

If you work in technology, you should know that stuff like this tends to happen, even more often than you would think.
 
beyondcctv said:
Our hosting company disapeared. Webspacebar is offline since October 5, 2025.
8 October and still no word from Webspacebar.
They don,t answer their phones. No emails. No whatsup. Nothing.
All our websites are gone.
How can we get backups of websites?
Click to expand...
You can't call it backups if you're unable to get to it. You should have local copies of the backups.
Backup on website server, local storage and online at third party like Google Drive (in my case).
 
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cpu. said:
You can't call it backups if your unable to get to it. You should have local copies of the backups.
Backup on website server, local storage and online at third party like Google Drive (in my case).
Click to expand...

Based on that post I'm pretty sure they meant how do we make backups now that all our client sites are gone.
Some real lessons being learned this week.
 
jaybee109 said:
Thank you for your message and for being transparent about what’s happening. I can imagine how stressful the past week has been, and I do understand the pressure you’re under. I appreciate that you’re working to get everyone back online.


That said, please remember we are all business owners here, not just you. Our websites and emails being offline impacts our customers, our reputation, and our bottom line just as heavily as this outage impacts you. The lack of communication has made the situation far worse for us...a simple email update would have gone a long way. Since your auto-responses are still coming through, it’s clear the email database is intact, so it would have been possible to reach everyone quickly.


And if I can offer some constructive feedback: in the past, support has sometimes come across as unfriendly or abrupt and in some cases very condescending. In a crisis, people are more forgiving if they feel they’re being treated with warmth and kept in the loop. Clearer and more personable communication could really help you retain customers in the long run. I hope you take this into consideration when answering support queries in the future.


I appreciate the work you’re doing to get us restored and hope services stabilize soon.
Click to expand...
Totally agree. Resellers lost clients mostly because they had no idea of what happened to Webspace. No emails or whatsapps to explain. How does a client of Webspace even knows if this wasn,t the final bell? Without any info available up to now?
 
beyondcctv said:
Totally agree. Resellers lost clients mostly because they had no idea of what happened to Webspace. No emails or whatsapps to explain. How does a client of Webspace even knows if this wasn,t the final bell? Without any info available up to now?
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Good evening ,

You’re absolutely right, and I want to start by saying I’m genuinely sorry. Our own VPS, the one hosting our billing system and client area, was on the same storage that failed. So when it went down, we couldn’t even get into our own systems to send updates or emails. Looking back, that was a terrible mistake. We used to keep our management systems separate, but we trusted the platform so much that we placed everything together. Lesson learned, always keep those things apart.

Please know I’m not trying to shift the blame; this part is entirely on me. Communication should have continued no matter what, and we didn’t manage that. You’re right to be upset, and I fully understand how it looked from the outside.

We’ve since realised that relying on our billing system alone for communication is risky. We’re looking into better ways to reach everyone, maybe an app or independent notification system for news letters and updates. Something that will always have an up to date copy of customer email lists.

For context, WhatsApp blocked us before for sending bulk updates to too many people at once, and we can’t risk spamming anyone. Still, that’s not an excuse, we should’ve had a proper plan.

Right now, the data center is still assisting us with moving virtual servers off the network storage and onto dedicated SSD kits. Things are slowly coming back to life at much faster speeds, and we expect everything to be fully online from around 2am onwards. I must say the speeds now is a breath of fresh air to me.

Thank you for calling us out, and for still being here to talk about it. We’re not going anywhere, we’re accountable, and we’re doing everything we can to ensure that communication gets addressed. Systems fail, its the people behind the systems that make your day better. Id like to think we are one of those people, making your day better after systems failed, we pick it up and we ensure it gets taken care of. I appreciate you beyondcctv, I really do, even if you move to another host, its only ever a pleasure to host websites for our customers, and I mean that with all my heart. You are the reason we are in business. Without the customer we wouldnt be here.

Warm regards,
Team WebSpaceBar
 
When i hear you hosting production workloads using Proxmox , that in itself is a red flag.Makes you wonder what other parts of the infra you are cheaping out on.
 
ubercal said:
When i hear you hosting production workloads using Proxmox , that in itself is a red flag.Makes you wonder what other parts of the infra you are cheaping out on.
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That’s a fair comment, and I understand why some people see Proxmox and think it is a home lab setup. In our case, it is about flexibility and control. We have had good results running production on it, and it helps us respond quickly when things go wrong.

We are not a big data center with endless resources. We are a small team, and what we do have is personal attention and genuine care for our customers. I am not going to pretend we have a huge budget or try to sell something that is not real. It is also not like we are running things on free hosting platforms either.

We moved away from cPanel because the constant price increases made it impossible to keep hosting affordable for people who are price conscious. That is simply not our market. We focus on offering solid and dependable service at a fair price, and that means making careful choices about where we spend money.

I really do appreciate your comment, and I do not mind being teased for running on Proxmox. That is fair. There are always things we could buy to make things faster or more advanced, but at the end of the day, a Suzuki will still get you where you need to go just like a BMW will. They just do not cost the same.
 
Just to share a bit more about what we use, we run DirectAdmin, which offers all the same features you’d expect from cPanel, just with a cleaner and more efficient interface. Every account includes Softaculous for easy WordPress installation, as well as SitePad and Kopage website builders for anyone who prefers a drag and drop experience.

For backups, we use JetBackup, with nightly backups stored safely off site to AWS. So we’re definitely not cutting corners, we just prefer solutions that are reliable, resource-friendly, and cost effective for both us and our clients.

We really appreciate everyone who’s stuck with us and continues to ask questions. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to explain.


Warm regards,
Team WebSpaceBar
 
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The Web Space Bar said:
Just to share a bit more about what we use, we run DirectAdmin, which offers all the same features you’d expect from cPanel, just with a cleaner and more efficient interface. Every account includes Softaculous for easy WordPress installation, as well as SitePad and Kopage website builders for anyone who prefers a drag and drop experience.

For backups, we use JetBackup, with nightly backups stored safely off site to AWS. So we’re definitely not cutting corners, we just prefer solutions that are reliable, resource-friendly, and cost effective for both us and our clients.

We really appreciate everyone who’s stuck with us and continues to ask questions. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to explain.


Warm regards,
Team WebSpaceBar
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I just read through this whole thread. Geez that whole incident was terrible. Hope you and the team get some much needed sleep.
 
Happy to confirm that all VMs are now running on the physical SSD kit. The speeds are fantastic, it’s like we went from dial up to warp drive overnight. My respect goes out to all the data center engineers who work where no one sees them, keeping the world running one blinking LED at a time. You’re the unsung heroes in my book. Wishing everyone a well-deserved rest after this digital marathon.
 
The Web Space Bar said:
Hi Jaybee,

Thank you so much for your message, and for the way you said it, calmly, fairly, and with understanding. I really appreciate that.

You’re absolutely right. Communication should have been better. Between trying to keep servers online, coordinating restores, and dealing with the storage disaster, I dropped the ball on updates. That’s on me, and I’m truly sorry for that. A short email to everyone would have helped ease some of the panic, and you’re right, that should’ve been done. Our client database was on the same storage, which is silly of me. To put it lightly. The entire billing platform had its own vm on that kit. Learn from my mistakes.

What you said about support also hits home. I’ve seen it myself at times, when the pressure gets high, replies can come across a bit too short or abrupt. I completely understand how it feels on the other side. We’re going to work on that, properly. People deserve to feel heard and helped, especially when things go wrong.

This week has been brutal, but hearing feedback like yours really helps me see what we can do better. Thank you again for the message and for still giving us a chance to make this right. I won’t forget it.

As soon as we have more news about the recovery process we will post updates on Whatsapp as well as here.
Click to expand...
Any update on restoring our websites? They all show errors on Thursday morning 6h30
 
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