When I started McQueen Analytics in 2020, I was not even sure I would keep the company name. Namecheap was the perfect choice for that point in the business. It kept my initial costs down and put the domain, website hosting and email in one place. I needed a working company setup, but I did not need to spend money pretending I already knew what the company would become.
Namecheap did that job. The wart was junk mail and email deliverability, and I should have moved company email earlier.
the email that never arrived
The clearest warning came in November 2025, from an email to my financial advisor. He never saw it, not even in spam. I only found out because I texted him asking why he had not responded. He had his IT person check, and I was told the message had never even made it to his mailbox. His IT person made a manual fix on the receiving side.
An email that never reached the mailbox was different from one landing in junk mail. Resending one email was easy. Running the company by texting people to ask whether an important message had arrived was not. Email deliverability had become a company risk.
I should have moved company email to Google then. Instead I kept checking, sending things again and working around the problem.
time debt is real
Time debt is real, and I know because I never made time to move it to Google while the old email mostly worked. By the time it stopped working, I had no choice: I lost 18 hours of email access, and all the work I had put off was still there: old messages, DNS records, accounts, phones and a live company that still needed the address while I changed it.
Most days, email worked while I was looking at it. Asking someone if they received something took a minute, and checking junk mail took another minute, so I kept choosing those interruptions over the larger move. On August 13, I no longer got to choose the timing.
about 18 hours without email
Namecheap opened the emergency-maintenance notice at 8:35 a.m. Eastern on Thursday, August 13. I could see the size of the problem in the list: Namecheap.com, shared hosting, Private Email, hosting mailboxes and even the support channels customers would normally use during an outage.1
Namecheap's first post on X described a power outage, which did not tell me why recovery was taking so long. A later update from CEO Hillan Klein gave the more specific account. He said cooling had failed at the Phoenix facility hosting Namecheap services and more than 5,000 servers were shut down before they overheated. PhoenixNAP later said storms had interrupted utility service, which affected the chillers and sent the temperature up inside the datacenter.2
PhoenixNAP reported hosted services back online at 6:23 p.m. Mountain time and its support system restored at 11 p.m., or 2 a.m. Eastern on August 14. For me, that meant about 18 hours without company email.3
I had already moved the McQueen Analytics website to Cloudflare and HubSpot, so the main company site stayed up. Company email, RadiationBox and the cPanel helper tools were still unavailable to me while I tried to respond.
a better and safer place
The new system is pretty simple when I say it out loud: company email is in Google Workspace, while Cloudflare and HubSpot keep the website separate. Any one of them can have an outage. What I no longer have is one outage taking away the company website and email at the same time.
I did not completely fire Namecheap, and I do not think I needed to. We still use it for some things.
The new system costs more than the one I built in 2020, and I am fine with that. The cheaper system worked when I was not sure about the company. After 18 hours without email, I am much more interested in what the system costs when it fails.
Other reads on the outage and the system
- Namecheap's August 13 emergency-maintenance page recorded the affected services and recovery updates during the incident.
- Hillan Klein's first detailed update described the cooling failure, protective shutdown and scale of the event.
- PhoenixNAP's incident record carries the final facility restoration timeline.
Source notes
- Namecheap, Namecheap.com Website and Services: Emergency Maintenance, opened August 13, 2026 at 8:35 a.m. Eastern. The live page listed effects on Namecheap.com, shared hosting, Private Email, hosting mailboxes, account operations and the normal support channels. Namecheap said DNS resolution remained available and delayed email was not expected to be lost.
- Namecheap's first broad X post described a power outage. Hillan Klein's later update named a cooling-system failure at PhoenixNAP, said the shutdown protected more than 5,000 servers from overheating and provided the first detailed recovery estimate. PhoenixNAP's incident record attributed the elevated temperature to multiple utility interruptions during storms that affected the RadiusDC facility's chillers.
- PhoenixNAP, Higher ambient temperature in the Phoenix DC, August 13, 2026. PhoenixNAP reported facility services back online at 6:23 p.m. Mountain Standard Time and its support system operational with all systems restored at 11 p.m. Mountain Standard Time.