For those of you that missed this, our dathorn.com and forums.dathorn.com websites were unavailable for approximately 17 hours due to a rather serious event that occurred at the data center which housed the server that previously hosted these websites. Here is a brief explanation of what occurred (as written by the staff of The Planet):
This outage did not impact any of our customer servers at all. Within a couple of hours of this occurring we had put up a temporary status page on our domain to keep everyone informed as the severity of the situation became clear. On this page we also provided temporary contact information to be used for obtaining support from us.
We already had future plans to migrate our websites from the aging server (sadly a Pentium 4 w/ IDE drives) that was impacted by this outage to a new one. Due to the seriousness and expected duration of this outage we decided to go ahead and take this time to proceed with this migration. If you are reading this you are now loading our website from a new server in Washington, DC. We chose to move it to Washington, DC to further separate it from our customer servers which are located in Dallas, TX and our backup servers which are located in Seattle, WA.
As of this moment the data center where this explosion occurred is still quite a ways away from having anything back online. Fortunately our off site backups allowed us to easily recover from this. Just note that some of you may find that you are missing some recent tickets that may have been created or responded to between this past Friday and Saturday.
If you discover any problems with our website or these forums please go ahead and submit a ticket or e-mail us at support@dathorn.com so that we can get it resolved. Our testing period was fairly limited given the circumstances so it is possible that there might still be a few lingering issues even though everything checked out okay on our end.
This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 (Houston) data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.
We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.
This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.
We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.
This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.
We already had future plans to migrate our websites from the aging server (sadly a Pentium 4 w/ IDE drives) that was impacted by this outage to a new one. Due to the seriousness and expected duration of this outage we decided to go ahead and take this time to proceed with this migration. If you are reading this you are now loading our website from a new server in Washington, DC. We chose to move it to Washington, DC to further separate it from our customer servers which are located in Dallas, TX and our backup servers which are located in Seattle, WA.
As of this moment the data center where this explosion occurred is still quite a ways away from having anything back online. Fortunately our off site backups allowed us to easily recover from this. Just note that some of you may find that you are missing some recent tickets that may have been created or responded to between this past Friday and Saturday.
If you discover any problems with our website or these forums please go ahead and submit a ticket or e-mail us at support@dathorn.com so that we can get it resolved. Our testing period was fairly limited given the circumstances so it is possible that there might still be a few lingering issues even though everything checked out okay on our end.