The Sudden Fall of Aberdeen Cloud: A Small Web Dev Company's Survival Story
In the mid-2010s, my small web development company specialized in building and hosting Drupal websites for clients. We prided ourselves on delivering reliable, custom solutions, and for hosting, we partnered with Aberdeen Cloud—a provider that seemed perfect for our needs at the time. Little did we know, this partnership would lead to one of the most chaotic chapters in our business history.
Aberdeen Cloud shut down abruptly on June 28, 2016, causing widespread outages and leaving countless websites inaccessible. Signs of trouble had been brewing: delayed support tickets, intermittent service failures like Solr crashes, random downtime, and eventually, the complete loss of SSH access, which crippled tools like git and rsync. For us, this wasn't just a distant news story—we experienced the breakdown firsthand. One day, our clients' sites were up; the next, they vanished into the digital void.
Panic set in as we scrambled to recover. We had to track down a former employee based in Finland who still had access to the AWS accounts tied to Aberdeen. It was a tense few hours of international calls and coordination, but we managed to log in, download our customers' websites, databases, and assets just in time. Transferring everything to new hosting providers was no small feat—testing migrations, updating DNS, and ensuring no data loss amid the stress.
We weren't alone in this nightmare. Stories from other agencies echoed our ordeal. Annertech, an Irish digital firm, had spotted the red flags early in 2015 and launched "Project Exodus," migrating over 20 sites to Platform.sh in a three-week sprint. They completed it just a month before the collapse, avoiding disaster through proactive planning and off-site backups. They even shared open-source scripts on GitHub to help others salvage data from similar setups.
NachoDigital faced a closer call. They'd migrated most sites but left one behind, only to see it disappear during the shutdown. Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and their own partial backups, they rebuilt it manually. When Aberdeen briefly announced a 36-hour window for data recovery, they jumped on it. Their lesson? Always automate off-site backups on a separate provider—never trust your host for everything.
Code Enigma, a UK Drupal agency, tried troubleshooting during the meltdown but found servers irretrievable. They criticized Aberdeen's poor communication and helped clients shift to alternatives like Platform.sh afterward. On Reddit's Drupal community, outrage poured in, with users accusing the company of knowing about its impending failure yet failing to warn clients.
In our case, a lifeline came from Robert Douglas at Platform.sh. He reached out personally, offering guidance and resources to get our hosting back online within days. That support was invaluable during such a difficult and stressful time—it turned potential catastrophe into a manageable transition. Without it, and without our quick action via that Finnish ex-colleague, we might have lost clients and our reputation.
This experience taught us the hard way about the fragility of cloud hosting. We now emphasize diversified backups, regular restore tests, and not putting all eggs in one provider's basket. If you're in web dev, remember: proactivity saves sites. Our company emerged stronger, but the fall of Aberdeen Cloud remains a cautionary tale from the 2010s hosting wars.