Explosion At ThePlanet Datacenter Drops 9,000 Servers

An anonymous reader writes "Customers hosting with ThePlanet, a major Texas hosting provider, are going through some tough times. Yesterday evening at 5:45 pm local time an electrical short caused a fire and explosion in the power room, knocking out walls and taking the entire facility offline. No one was hurt and no servers were damaged. Estimates suggest 9,000 servers are offline, affecting 7,500 customers, with ETAs for repair of at least 24 hours from onset. While they claim redundant power, because of the nature of the problem they had to go completely dark. This goes to show that no matter how much planning you do, Murphy's Law still applies." Here's a Coral CDN link to ThePlanet's forum where staff are posting updates on the outage. At this writing almost 2,400 people are trying to read it.

Comments

Kudo to their support team

[QuietLagoon]

... for posting frequent updates to the status of the outage.

Re:Server/customer ratio?

[42forty-two42]

Wouldn't people who want such redundancy consider putting the other server in another DC?

Re:More planning could have prevented this

[ottawanker]

so you're agreeing with me. The servers getting blown up was a huge mistake, one that certainly could have been avoided with a little proper planning. you are a fucking moron

UMM.. USE STATIC PAGE??

[kyoorius]

There's no reason to use the forum software when they've locked the thread and are only using it to disseminate information. A Pentium one running lighttpd serving a static html page would be sufficient to handle the flood of requests.