fos
06-01-2008, 08:02 PM
I have been following a thread at Webhostingtalk regarding the fire yesterday at The Planet's Houston, TX datacenter. More than 9000 servers are off line. There is also an article on Slashdot.
The fire evidently occurred in a central part of the buildings electrical distribution system blowing out at least three adjacent walls. Purportedly, none of the customers servers were damaged.
This is a major outage and is affecting a large number of companies including HostGator. They have over 1000 servers off line.
I live in the Houston metropolis. There has been nothing in the news covering this issue. I guess even 9000 servers is a small portion of the internet but it is likely to have a major impact on The Planet. They are a large reputable company but Murphy's Law can strike anyone.
I have been a customer of HostGator for a number of years. One of the servers I had with them was located in Dallas, the other was here in Houston. They are a reputable company as well. I am sure Gator Brent will do the right thing for his customers as he always has.
On the threads, many individuals affected are losing large sums of money. One even claims to have lost a $10,000,000 deal. I'll take that with a grain of salt but many are losing a lot none the less.
The server business has become a commodity, much like a grocery store. With the small margins, how can any small or large company protect itself from major outages like this? I recently switched to a small firm called colo4jax in Jacksonville, FL. For a relatively small fee I have a server and free remote off site backup. All of my data is available. If my one server were to go down I could rent from someone else and be back online within a couple of days. But I'm really small potatoes!
Hindsight is 20/20. Maybe we should all use this experience to put backup plans in place.
fos
PS. In the very early days of computing, I was developing a database for my consulting business on a TRS-80. I had quite a bit of time invested. One of my sons was a toddler at the time. He toddled over to my computer station. His attention was attracted to the large red button on the face of the console. He pushed it......
All current data lost. It was a quick lesson to backup on a regular basis.
The fire evidently occurred in a central part of the buildings electrical distribution system blowing out at least three adjacent walls. Purportedly, none of the customers servers were damaged.
This is a major outage and is affecting a large number of companies including HostGator. They have over 1000 servers off line.
I live in the Houston metropolis. There has been nothing in the news covering this issue. I guess even 9000 servers is a small portion of the internet but it is likely to have a major impact on The Planet. They are a large reputable company but Murphy's Law can strike anyone.
I have been a customer of HostGator for a number of years. One of the servers I had with them was located in Dallas, the other was here in Houston. They are a reputable company as well. I am sure Gator Brent will do the right thing for his customers as he always has.
On the threads, many individuals affected are losing large sums of money. One even claims to have lost a $10,000,000 deal. I'll take that with a grain of salt but many are losing a lot none the less.
The server business has become a commodity, much like a grocery store. With the small margins, how can any small or large company protect itself from major outages like this? I recently switched to a small firm called colo4jax in Jacksonville, FL. For a relatively small fee I have a server and free remote off site backup. All of my data is available. If my one server were to go down I could rent from someone else and be back online within a couple of days. But I'm really small potatoes!
Hindsight is 20/20. Maybe we should all use this experience to put backup plans in place.
fos
PS. In the very early days of computing, I was developing a database for my consulting business on a TRS-80. I had quite a bit of time invested. One of my sons was a toddler at the time. He toddled over to my computer station. His attention was attracted to the large red button on the face of the console. He pushed it......
All current data lost. It was a quick lesson to backup on a regular basis.