Comments on: When Acts of God Bring Down Web Hosts

By: Zadling

Zadling — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 01:18:16 +0000

I wonder what your thoughts on HostGator are. They had a server outage a weeks ago for all of their clients. My website was down for about 5 hours. Absolutely everyone was freaking out. The only way to get updates was through Twitter thankfully. Their support was down. There was literally 1,000 tweets per minutes when they went down. Ever since then I haven't had a problem though.

By: Ferodynamics

Ferodynamics — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:33:33 +0000

You missed Sealand, the island platform datacenter guarded by guys with machine guns. WIRED did a whole article on how "safe" it was. Supposedly filled with an unbreathable gas for added security. Well, the whole thing caught fire.

By: Richard Ward

Richard Ward — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 01:17:20 +0000

After spending 10 years in the hosting industry, a few trucks here and there isn't a bad track record given all the hosting start-ups and 1-man companies you could be trusting your site to.

I'll take my chances with the Mack.

By: Steven

Steven — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:16:10 +0000

Another disaster:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=549369

By: jeff

jeff — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 23:56:37 +0000

what about the tornodo that took down the equinix ashburn facility a few years back.

By: small_host

small_host — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 08:17:26 +0000

The bottom line is redundancy if you have a website that is valuable to you you better treat it as such. I am a small web host and this is exactly what I tell my customers. Back up your sites. I mail out a email news letter every week to all customers and the very first line is "Have you backed up your website this week" This covers my ass if I ever lose a server. All the servers run raid but you never really know. If my data center did burn to the ground I can say, Well I did warn you to back up your site every week now didn't I. Bottom line is Back up often and even do things such as dual hosting accounts in different parts of the country then use remote dns that you can change on the fly. If the site goes down in one data center then switch dns and it will be up in the other data center within a few minutes. I have complete backups of all my sites on my hard drive (which is itself auto backed up to a second drive every night) I run my own small data center (I am not just a reseller) but I do have reseller accounts with 2 other data centers. I can move any site or account to the new data center and have the website uploaded and the dns changed over night and be back in business. True most of my sites and my customer sites are fairly simple. If the site was larger and data base driven this would be a lot more complicated but as I said if the site is a money maker you just better treat it as such and take precautions. Bla bla all just based on logic right? The amazing thing is how many people who run a profitable website just seem to ignore logic and be unprepared. In my news letter I tell my customers that if they ever lose everything they can just consider that they did it on purpose as they were warned ever week it could happen and told exactly step by step how to plan and avoid this by keeping a full copy of their site as a backup.

By: spenser

spenser — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 10:21:31 +0000

I am surprised that at least one mention was not made about data center flooding.

It was a few years ago, but someone decided that it was a good idea to build a date center below ground. I take it that the fact that water seeks low ground was of no concern to them. At the end of the storm, it was deemed cheapest to just shutter the whole thing.

Even if you use a content distribution network, keep in mind that multiple origin servers in geographically diverse locations are required to be able to stay afloat.

The exception is if the CDN system is smart enough to retain caches where the origin servers have disappeared for extended durations. And that will work only if the entire site is run through the CDN and not just parts of it.

By: ronald

ronald — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 00:09:03 +0000

Off topic, and not spam.. I'm really liking this blog and the topics you choose to cover. This along with the paypal horror stories were a great/informative read. Welcome to my google homepage!

By: painkiller

painkiller — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 23:45:34 +0000

Yeah, this list is lame. All of those accidents were 100% preventable. A truck is not an act of God, it's an act of Jack Daniles and Buttguiser.Isn't Zipa's suite number like 1001? doesn't sound like a gound floor suite number. It'd be like running your DC from Noha's Ark. Now if the DC was in the basement and they had a periscope THAT would be impressive. What's more impressive is that they still had an OC3 that was running.

By: yournamehere

yournamehere — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 21:33:15 +0000

Yeah data centres generate lots of heat and they also sometimes cacth fire. we should surround them with with a fire-proofing, heat repelling material.

Failing that, surround them with a million tonnes of coal instead.

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 16:14:55 +0000

In contrast, Zipa, the people who hosted somethingawful.com, were hit by hurricane Katrina and kept their servers up with a diesel generator.
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/paypal-fiasco-summary.php

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 14:54:55 +0000

Loving this article merely for the Manchester reference in the comments. Blimey I didn't realise it was nearly four years ago... now I feel old.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 14:08:07 +0000

@Alex:

You shouldn't have lost the domain just because you didn't control the DNS. Just log into Godaddy and change the DNS servers for your domain. In short: your fault.

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 13:25:47 +0000

As far as I'm concerned, the worst is not on this list. foxlink networks out of orlando florida was hit by a florida hurricane in 2004 ? and not only did their data center go down, their business disappeared off the face of the earth altogether. It's still fishy as to what exactly happened, since i did manage to track down a couple of the people from the business later on, and it seemed that while they could have recovered after the hurricane, they just decided to throw in the towel instead. so much for valued customers...

I lost a domain completely out of the deal - it was registered through godaddy, and i didn't control the dns, foxlink did. so it went down since their servers were gone, and i could do nothing to change it. i had to quick throw up another site, from an OLD backup, and try for word of mouth to get the users of the site to find me. And instead of godaddy releasing it at the end of the registration, they put it up on a domain auction (crooks), and i managed to find out and was involved in the bidding (on my domain!), but i got wrapped up in something at work, and missed out on the final bidding, so i lost it.

Pretty much a worst possible case scenario, especially if that would have been a business-related domain that I relied on for sales.

By: Pietro Watanabe

Pietro Watanabe — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 13:20:56 +0000

Coal mines are also susceptible to methane buildup. And a perfect ignition source: Data Centers!

By: Sean

Sean — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 12:58:37 +0000

What about the Hurricane which took out all the main optical fibre connections to Australia? The connection between Australia and America was lost which caused a redirection through Hawaii and large pings were had by all.

By: Russ @ bombay potatoes

Russ @ bombay potatoes — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 12:44:49 +0000

Fires seem to be the worst culprit. Let's not forget the undergound fire in Manchester that took out a ton of cables some years ago: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/3577799.stm

Although sometimes, when a host goes down, I wonder whether they are being 100% honest

By: Mobile Answers

Mobile Answers — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 11:27:01 +0000

Round these parts of Digg, we call them Acts of Randomness.

By: Dito

Dito — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 02:32:08 +0000

kinda like the sinking of the titanic, they said it couldnt be done, and then it happened