I have a server with "The Planet" and Saturday afternoon I discovered my server was down. I could not get to my server to re-boot it so I went to the Planets Server Command center to submit a trouble ticket and their website was down, then tried to get to their main site and it was down. So I did the right thing and went to see the movie "What Happens in Vegas" when I got home I had received the following e-mail.
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Dear Valued Customers:

This evening at 4:55 in our H1 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 are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.

There is no impact in any of our other five data centers.

I am sorry that this accident has occurred and apologize for the impact.

Sincerely,

Douglas J. Erwin
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
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I'm sure this e-mail was written in distress and he mention alot more damage then he should have. The part mentioning "the short was in a high-volume wire conduit" makes me think their down time is going to be alot longer then he anticipates. As of this writing my server is still down.
I'm just going to sit back and see what happens but I'm sure other customers that they have must be quite up-set.

My question is what should someone do in this case? Should people have a back up plan in an emergency such as this? If so what should it be and how would they go about it?

By the way "What Happens in Vegas" was a very funny and entertaing movie and well worth seeing.

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I am the wife of the manager of tech support for The Planet. While I know nothing as far as "tech speak" I can vouch for the fact they have been working their tails off 'round the clock to fix this and it's being treated as a major crisis management issue. They were working thru the night and are still on it as we speak. No sleep for the Planet, I assure you!

Make regularly backups of all your important server files and keep them in a separate place. Today you can setup cheaply a new server in very short time for short periods if you want it that way.

If your sites are very important to you, you may be interested in failover or .
'load balancing', (failover included).

Your name servers should also be on different places.

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Thank you TCM for your reply, believe me I know that they are doing their best. But my post was for others to plan ahead for a possible emergency where lets say instead of a temporary problem, it was a fire and the whole building was destroyed. Having back up files on your server could be one thing, another back-up server available with another host, having the knowhow to change IP's for your sites in a hurry ect.....

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