Digital Home Thoughts: Planet Data Center Explosion, Our Server Goes Down

Wondering why our sites were down for most of the weekend? Just when I thought our significant down-time days were behind us, something crazy happens:

"An explosion Saturday evening at a Texas-based, privately held server hosting provider has caused server outages effecting 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. According to The Planet's website, at about 5 p.m. Saturday electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding their electrical equipment room. No injuries were reported and no servers were damaged or lost. The Houston company, which provides servers for small and medium sized companies, said it has its entire support team working around the clock to get the servers back on line. They estimate they will be up and running by Sunday afternoon."

I spent most of my weekend checking this forum thread hourly, trying to determine when my server would be brought back online. It didn't happen Sunday afternoon - late Sunday night everything was still down, but this morning when I woke up I was happy to see things were loading again. Big thanks to our server admin volunteer Jorj Bauer for keeping a close watch on all of this and getting us back to live status while I was just waking up (and to Janak, Darius, and Jon for their help). Back to our regularly scheduled programming...