Off topic, but I'm sure still relevant to many readers. This morning I hopped over to Jay Charles's blog and read a post about a huge explosion at ThePlanet's Houston datacenter. ThePlanet is a large hosting provider of dedicated servers (maybe the biggest in the US?), and I run two servers there myself, one serving up the page you are currently reading.
Downtime for a popular website is of course a bad situation, but accidents do happen and not all the time is there someone to blame - they are simply that: accidents. When you face a service outage (my site and server were not affected) then all you can ask for is that the provider does everything in their power to restore availability to the sites and servers in question.
Which brings me to my point: having read this thread of posts by ThePlanet's staff, and listened to this message by their CEO made be realize the gravity of the situation (it was a miracle that nobody was killed or injured by the incident) I would like to highlight the excellent service the people involved have provided. I have been very happy with ThePlanet ever since I signed uo several years ago, but I think it takes a situation such as this to really show what a company is made of. Of course this incident puts things into perspective too: for one it shows how fragile this whole interweb thing really is, and secondly how very insignificant 'being online' can be.
In times when people are quick to criticize bad service it's important to highlight the good examples too. My hat's off to the staff at ThePlanet for putting things right as quickly as humanly possible, and for keeping their customers informed about the progress - even when there was little to report. It doesn't really matter exactly how long things take when you know that someone in Texas is working their backside off to get you back online.
#1 by Jim Phelan on 6/7/08 - 4:35 AM
The Planet did an all right job here given the circumstances, but I've never found their service to go above and beyond. One of their emails went as far as to commend themselves on how well they'd done in the face of this issue.
I understand that things like this happen and I really wish them the best, but we're accountable to our customers and our servers are going to have to go elsewhere.
#2 by Stefan Richter on 6/7/08 - 7:27 AM
I guess to some extend it's a you get what you pay for situation, at least when it comes to communication of the problem. Rackspace charge considerably more for their services.
I understand that you will look elsewhere, but as you've witnessed there is no way to avoid downtime with any provider when something like this happens - unless you mirror all your services to several locations.