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83 Comments
- str3ama, on 12/08/2007, -2/+79someone tell me what an image of a person walking down an alley has to do with web hosts crashing as a result of fire, storms, etc?
- capiCrimm, on 12/08/2007, -9/+77*Acts of The Flying Spaghetti Monster
- PathDaemon, on 12/08/2007, -1/+44Acts of God? Sounds like all these failures were caused by maintenance issues, largely in cooling. Generators are supposed to actually work, not just look good on the datacenter spec sheet.
- Salviati, on 12/08/2007, -0/+30I'll have what Google's having, please.
- BathWater, on 12/08/2007, -5/+27"do any of the air conditioning units in datacenters actually work?"
- crackah, on 12/08/2007, -0/+12Wouldn't coal mines have issues with dampness?
- erickf, on 12/08/2007, -2/+12There's no god, except for God.
- BoneStamp, on 12/08/2007, -1/+10Any datacenter I've been in is freezing! I can't imagine them trying to run all those air conditioners even harder when the power fails, seems to be a likely point of failure. I guess that's where the coal mine might help, of course they introduce lots of new problems! Let's put datacenters on the moon!
- MrMajeika, on 12/08/2007, -0/+8Spot on! I was expecting to hear of poor unfortunate hosting cos who'd been stuck by lightning or flooded. There is nothing unexpected or unforseen about a power outage (regardless of the cause). If these guys had backup systems that actually worked there wouldn't have been a problem!
- aywwts4, on 12/08/2007, -0/+8My favorite example of ***** hitting the fan is this website back during that northeastern power outage years ago. Where Murphy's law got a little carried away...
""Like many companies affected by the power outage, we are working very hard to bring things back to normal. We thought we had all the angles of redundancy covered, but through this trial by fire we have found out otherwise.
Not only did our generator develop a fuel clog, but the provider of our OC3 connection went down too. When we brought the machines back online this morning one of the machines refused to boot because of a main board fault.
The machines that run [removed].com were purchased in a manner so that they would all be generically interchangeable, and swappable in the event of failure. As it turns out one of the very mission critical machines had a different CPU than all the others. The vendor is overnighting new ones to us, but the earliest we will have it online is late Saturday morning.
We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope you'll bear with us through this mess.
Thank you,"
Power, generators, the tubes, and that one pin holding their server together all went down at once. - commentbot, on 12/08/2007, -3/+11Dreamhost sucks? This is the best web hosting company I know. I have swiched from webhost to webhost over the last 8 years and I have settled for Dreamhost. I found it much much better than the average cPanel webhosts.
- childprey, on 12/08/2007, -2/+10I'd assume the Invisible Pink Unicorn was responsible.
- scottc, on 12/08/2007, -1/+8Based on comments from their former clients I would say that while Dreamhost is not great, they are far superior to GoDaddy. They do at least try to accommodate their clients, while GoDaddy expects your needs to be identical to those of all of their other clients, and therefore can't give much beyond canned responses to support requests.
- gringer, on 12/08/2007, -0/+7Summary: datacentres could do with a bit more forethought about how hot their backup generators get.
- Error601, on 12/08/2007, -0/+799% uptime is rather poor. That's 3.65 days a year. Our system downtime requirements are usually measured in hours a year.
- mscman, on 12/08/2007, -0/+7Obviously the author hasn't actually *worked* in a datacenter. As someone who works in a research datacenter, we rely on chilled water from our campus' power plant. If anything happens at the power plant to cause us to lose chilled water, we have ~10 minutes to get most of our servers shut down, or we risk overheating half of our equipment. Problems can occur at any moment. Now luckily we don't promise our users 99% uptime or we would be breaking contracts all the time... (Not our own faults; the maintenance guys at our university have an extremely horrible habit of taking down the power to wrong parts of campus....)
- Hosalabad, on 12/08/2007, -0/+6An idiot crashing a truck isn't an act of god. And in no case is a host having a poorly managed and designed cooling system an act of god either. If you aren't smart enough to have an intermediate supply of power between commercial and generator spool up, you deserve to lose your business.
- scottc, on 12/08/2007, -1/+6In web hosting, like most of the rest of life, you usually get what you pay for. If you are paying a couple dollars a month for a hosting account your site will be on a server packed with thousands of others and you will not likely get any personal attention when you need help. Those hosts are adequate for hobby and personal sites, though, because a little downtime isn't really important.
The best way to find a good web host is exactly what you are doing - asking for recommendations from people who are happy with their host. I would give you a recommendation, but I own a hosting company so it would be a biased opinion. :-) - HigherLogic, on 12/08/2007, -0/+5http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof
- b0wl0fud0n, on 12/08/2007, -0/+5Sorry, but I gotta jump in on this comment. In a coal mine, air independently of the rock temperatures is warmer than at the surface because there's a greater density - plus you're getting closer to the center of the earth. In terms of the feasibility of the moon, the day time temperature on the moon is 107°C.
- thailand1972, on 12/08/2007, -0/+5FastHosts (Gloucester, UK) were involved in severe flooding in that area of England, though their datacentres weren't flooded, they were subject to a power cut because of the floods. (their back-up petrol-driven generators ran out of petrol.....!).
Never mind that, the army were called in to place sandbags around the Walham power station near FastHosts - if THAT got flooded, it would have meant a mass evacuation of Gloucester which would have meant days, probably WEEKS of downtime with all of FastHosts websites - all 650,000 (yes - six hundred and fifty thousand - estimated) websites (FH are the biggest host in the UK).
More info on Walham power station:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weather/Story/0,,2133463 ... - sgoogle, on 12/08/2007, -0/+53.65 days can be measured in hours :p
- FredSpeaking, on 12/08/2007, -0/+4Imagine what an earthquake or slide would do to a subterranean server.. no thanks
- AlexFerny, on 12/08/2007, -0/+4what, a server in every data center in the world? They cant ALL go down at once :P
- daven1986, on 12/08/2007, -0/+4those things are really freaky except for the truck. The other two are just datacentres overheating - nothing freaky about that.
- DiggCommando, on 12/08/2007, -1/+5So this is how Pirates of the Flaming Sea manages to have 110% up time!
- HigherLogic, on 12/08/2007, -0/+4DH is much better than GD. And I've always thought GD should stick with what made them, domains and not hosting. I wouldn't put my website on either of them though...
- vanscott, on 12/08/2007, -1/+5If we can interconnect two continents with an underwater cable, we can get high capacity lines to the top of everest. The wind power on-top of Everest should be more than enough for power. That said, this is just a really stupid idea.
Changes that customers are going to demand from their data centers. Lower power consuming servers and more redundancy via clustered data centers. Google's current infrastructure can completely take over the hosting market. http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=80 ... - wattersm, on 12/08/2007, -0/+3In a properly designed one, yes. Our chillers run on generator power just fine.
- thailand1972, on 12/08/2007, -1/+4"With just about every hosting service now promising 99 percent uptime"
If a hosting company promised me 2 nines uptime, I'd tell them no thanks (that's about 3 and a half days downtime per year). - digitalarcanum, on 12/08/2007, -0/+3If the datacenter is nicely designed, those AC units should never go down. We have six AC units in our datacenter, three that are always on, three that are failover AC units. We also have massive UPS power and a massive generator that kicks in when power goes out. I was here when the generator tests were run and nothing skipped a beat.
besides that, systems in a data center will still overheat even in a properly ventilated data center. Every hear or hot spots, or poorly designed server cases? IBM x330 335 and 336 servers are pretty horrible for this, in our data center at least. - socalrob, on 12/08/2007, -4/+7"Japan is investigating alternative placement of datacenters. Their best idea yet: abandoned coal mines."
Yeah don't try that in America. Too many coal mines collapsing here. But for these fire and cooling issues, maybe an alternative would be on top of high mountains, like Mt. Everest. A box fan in a window sucking air in would be good enough there. And no worries of trucks hitting generators. - cawpin, on 12/08/2007, -0/+3There's a lot more coal mines collapsing in Japan and China than in the US.
- grumpyrain, on 12/09/2007, -0/+2Yes, we do worry about our generators overheating and catching fire. I suppose we can at least be comfortable that within the confines of an abandoned coal mine, any such fire would be easily contained.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia%2C_Pennsylv ... - GrantTheGr8, on 12/09/2007, -0/+2Poorly written ***** comment.
- sgoogle, on 12/08/2007, -0/+2Now this was an "act of god" that nearly wiped out PlusNet in Sheffield:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/26/sheffield_ ...
Journeys that normally took 20 minutes were taking ~5 hours. You've got to look at the photos on the PlusNet forums for more background
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,19 ...
I live near a dam that almost breached in this, it would have sent millions of tons of straight towards a village that was already flooded - skyshock1, on 12/08/2007, -0/+2In the datacentre I work at, there was once an incident where we lost a percentage of our bandwidth because hunters in the nearby area shot through a fiber line.
- Upsizer, on 12/08/2007, -0/+2PEOPLE, please, it's just a figure of speech. I strongly doubt the author is declaring whether a god exists or does not exist. The author is just trying to say how unlikely these events are.
- chedabob, on 12/08/2007, -0/+2If you sealed off sections of it, and placed dehumidifiers in each section, you might just be able to keep the servers dry. It's a long shot, and you'd probably just be better off investing the money in a decent above-ground centre.
- wattersm, on 12/08/2007, -0/+2We got hit by lightning, it sucked.
- SadFlask, on 12/08/2007, -0/+2Well I am just shopping around still, and I wouldn't mind having the name of your hosting company because I don't want to rule out your services just because you are biased for your own business.
- Ademan, on 12/08/2007, -0/+2I was using dreamhost for a while, and everything seemed rather slow, but it was never bad, and for my purposes it was perfect, plus the price was right, especially with those discount codes floating around.
- wrestlingnrj, on 12/08/2007, -0/+2Not mine, right now we are only using 2x2 ton AC units. Still waiting on our additional 8 ton unit arriving at the end of the month, IT's Christmas present.
- SomeoneSpecial, on 12/08/2007, -3/+5Buried for inaccuracy. Prove there's no god.
- SadFlask, on 12/08/2007, -3/+5Hey guys, I'm looking for a web host and I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions as to which service is the best all around? I was going to go with Godaddy, it seems like the best deal. I figured this would be a good time to ask, considering the topic.
- Netrilix, on 12/08/2007, -0/+2Yeah, I thought most places were offering at least 99.9%.
- linuxpenguin, on 12/08/2007, -0/+2And you survived? Wow.
- Nootay, on 12/08/2007, -0/+1ive always used Nexpoint as my hosting company. www.nexpoint.net never had any problems with them. good support oo
- blazes816, on 12/08/2007, -0/+1Unless god was driving. So god is a woman....
- Atomic1fire, on 12/08/2007, -0/+1unless there is a world war
I mean all google needs is a masive war with its datacenters getting bombed on all sides -
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