When the Internet Blinks

Today Cloudflare had an outage that affected, what seemed like most of the internet. Starting at about 8:30 AM Eastern and lasting for several hours, countless services simply stopped responding. Social platforms, AI tools, dashboards, and website monitoring services all went dark at once. My first thought was that maybe the internet was rebooting and hinting that maybe we should step outside and see that there’s a whole world out there beyond technology. Possibly true, but doubtful.

The truth is, it was a strange sight, and for many people (or at least for me) it raised a simple question:

What happens when the tool you rely on is part of the outage?

This is not about any specific SaaS product. It is about architecture. When a tool is cloud based, your ability to use it depends not only on the tool itself but on the entire stack the vendor relies on. That includes their cloud provider, DNS provider, CDN, firewall, routing, and all the things that sit between you and their servers. If something breaks upstream, the tool breaks with it.

For most users this is an acceptable tradeoff. Cloud services are convenient, easy to onboard, and usually very resilient. But days like today highlight a different set of priorities for people who manage dozens or hundreds of WordPress sites. If your management dashboard is unavailable during an outage, you lose the ability to update plugins, check security, send reports, or respond to client issues. Even a short disruption can get stressful fast.

This is where MainWP takes a different path. MainWP is self hosted, which means your management dashboard lives wherever you choose to put it. You pick the server. You pick the DNS. You pick the backups and the level of redundancy. If a major internet provider has a bad day, there is no central service between you and your sites that can go down.

Self hosted does not mean invincible. Anything on the internet can fail. The difference is that you control the environment. If your hosting provider has trouble, you can move. If your DNS provider has trouble, you can switch. Your access to your management tools is not tied to a single vendor’s infrastructure.

SaaS tools still have real strengths. For many people the convenience alone is worth it. But if you run an agency or manage mission critical sites for clients, it is useful to think about where your single points of failure live. Today was a reminder that resilience starts with architecture, not marketing.

MainWP was built so that your ability to manage your sites is not dependent on someone else’s cloud. Days like this make that choice feel a little more relevant.