Fire takes down The Planet

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Posted Sunday, 1 June 2008, 09:37 HST @734

One of the country’s largest web hosting companies, The Planet, is still down after a fire knocked out their main data center’s transformer. To their credit, Planet managers have been providing regular updates on a web forum. Here’s update #2, which is a good example:

Today at approximately 5:45 p.m. [CDT], a transformer in our H1 data center in Houston caught fire, thus requiring us to take down all generators as instructed by the fire department. All servers are down.

The Houston Fire Department ordered Planet staff to shut down the data center’s electric generators. Approximately 7500 9000 web servers and 9000 7500 customers are affected.

One reason that I use DreamHost.com to host billso.com is the incredible level of transparency that DreamHost provides. DreamHost is employee-owned, which helps explains their reporting policy. I’ve never had a major problem with DreamHost, but I know that I can check the status reports for the data center and most of their servers at any time, on the Web or with RSS

See Center Networks for more comments about the Planet fire. I agree with Allen Stern - given the number of servers and clients affected, I expected to hear much more on the blogosphere this morning. The outage affects Planet’s Server Command, ResellOne, and legacy EV1 customers.

The Hosting News posted an excellent article on 29 May 2008 about several recently completed projects at The Planet. It’s tempting to think that this project and the fire are connected, but there’s no indication of that yet. The Planet used to be known as EV1. I remember EV1 from from my years in Austin, when that company offered cut-rate dial-up internet service and web hosting. Their radio commercials were just awful.

The Register and Broadband Reports have posted very brief reports, and here’s the Wikipedia page for EV1.

Tags: austin, blogging, DRP, fire, Houston, ISP, power, reliability, status, Texas, USA

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3 responses so far ↓

1 Carlos Urreta // Sunday, 1 June 2008, 17:06 HST @046

I have one of those servers that are down… small correction for the numbers, it’s 9000 servers and 7500 customers.

ThePlanet, data center that is down, is one of the most professional hosts out there. They are not for the small one blog website, but rather power some of the largest sites on the net.

The response rate was extremely adequate the hourly forum posts to keep us up to date is quite nice.

ThePlanet, despite their setback has proved once again to be super professional.
2 billso // Sunday, 1 June 2008, 18:44 HST @114

Here’s an update via Center Networks: recovery may take several days, according to The Planet’s CEO, Doug Erwin. He now describes the fire as “an explosion”:

Three walls of the electrical equipment room on the first floor blew several feet from their original position, and the underground cabling that powers the first floor of H1 was destroyed.
3 Karlonia | Entrecard Fan // Tuesday, 3 June 2008, 13:16 HST @886

This outage at The Planet wound up affecting Entrecard, a popular traffic building and social network community for bloggers. The site was offline for a little over 24 hours on Saturday and Sunday.

Fortunately, it looks like Entrecard is back up and functioning pretty well now, so it seems that the outage has simply given us a one-day vacation from our dropping routines. For me this was a welcome break because I managed to log in shortly after the site came back online and was able to scoop up some relatively inexpensive advertising deals.