The Planet Went Down!
Entrecard was down since yesterday and curious me, of course I went click clicking. Ooooh theplanet.com is down! As in major catastrophe for this leading web hosting provider [Fourth largest hosting provider of web sites (3.1 million) - according to their web site]. If you’re like me and have been following the drama, you’d know that yesterday afternoon, a transformer explosion occurred in their Houston data center, housing 9,000 servers and affecting some 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers.
From reading the forum updates (http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=90185) I gather that included in this outage are major resellers. OUCH! 30 hours later and counting, they’re still out. It’s almost a fascinating read-athon for me, making me sit back and think, oh my F-ing buttness (excuse the language), I have to research what my simply web hosting company is doing for disaster preparedness. Reading through their web site, I am actually confident but I’ll still confirm with Matt tomorrow.
Just imagine, if I’m a nicely sized e-commerce web site, this is like big time loss of profit for me and SLAs giving me service credit doesn’t nearly compensate for my lost revenue. The last post reads that Phase 1 [first floor] is not looking good. Phase 1 contains 3,000 servers. Though they claim no data server has been damaged, it still means it could take longer to restore full operation to those companies housed in those 3,000 servers [they hope to have a temporary solution in place by tomorrow afternoon it says]. The other 6,000 are more fortunate, they may just be able to breathe again tomorrow morning. I hope Entrecard will be one of those up again tomorrow.
I have to say though, most big companies would have redundant backup systems in place in case something like this happen. But what if you’re in that place where you are growing but not at a position where you can’t afford such a system or if you’ve been caught off-guard. Not to mention ordinary web sites being sold through third party resellers. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.
From the staff to the CEO, they’re all posting updates out there. I’m telling you, it’s a fascinating read-athon. Just imagine the thousands of customers and some of them resellers … imagine the ordinary web sites going out for more than 24 hours. I wonder if this is quantifiable, or creates enough impact on internet activity yesterday [at least for some parts of the world]. Hmmm …
And you think internet is unstoppable.
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It’s funny but you don’t realize how addicted to entrecard until something like this happens. I used the missing “drop time” to visit new blogs I have been wanting to visit. So it wasn’t a total loss.
I’m glad that entrecard is back now.
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.