Alertra is a service that periodically tests Web services and notifies the affected parties if a site is down.If your company maintains a Web site, you might be interested in some low-cost, minimalist disaster-recovery systems we maintain in case of a catastrophe: Low-cost tricks for short-term disaster recovery This backup page displayed a notice that a fire at our hosting company had affected our site, so at least some explanation of what was happening was provided. For most of that period, however, we were able to display to visitors an alternative home page. was unavailable for about 34 hours on July 3 and 4. At the time, we thought that our server being down for a few hours was an acceptable risk as a rare, worst-case scenario. But connectivity in that case was completely restored in “only” eight hours. To be sure, Fisher Plaza did experience an earlier electrical fire on J(as described in John Cook’s Venture Blog). Given Adhost’s heavy-duty generating capacity, a total loss of power seemed so unlikely that using a single data center was regarded as a reasonable choice. Keeping two data centers synchronized in real time can double or triple a firm’s hosting expenses (including the added layer of network engineering). #Opendns updater router filtering windows#It is just too expensive to make fiscal sense.”īack in 2006, my staff and I made a decision for Windows Secrets that was similar to Jeremy Irish’s. “We’re not a bank, so although 29 hours is a long time to be down, we do not plan to duplicate our infrastructure so we are completely redundant. Jeremy Irish, president of parent company Groundspeak, spoke for many webmasters when he explained in a blog entry why his firm didn’t pay to keep two data centers running at all times: , a real-time geolocating service, was down for 29 hours.Bing Travel (a feature of Microsoft’s new search engine) was the last affected Web site to restore connectivity, according to the Dennis Schall blog.Authorize’s 238,000 clients were unable to process credit-card transactions for more than 12 hours. The credit-processing firm maintained a completely separate data center as a backup, but the servers there failed to come online when the crisis struck, according to a Data Center Knowledge article. , one of the world’s largest credit-card gateways, is headquartered in Massachusetts but chose to locate servers at Adhost on the strength of the hosting company’s redundant systems.The Fisher Plaza fire, which knocked out hundreds of Web sites, was so hot that it melted metal plates in the basement.īesides Windows Secrets’ little collection of articles, the fire wiped some very big sites off the Internet: (See Figure 1, photo courtesy of KOMO News.)įigure 1. The station’s newscast that evening stated that the fire reached a temperature of 5,000F/2,760C and melted thick metal plates. The fire forced the evacuation of Adhost and every other company in the building, including KOMO-TV, Seattle’s ABC network affiliate. Our Web host in this building, named Adhost (short for “advanced hosting”), maintains an elaborate system of uninterruptible power supplies and two diesel generators that can supply electricity indefinitely if city utility power is cut.Īn electric arc blaze in Fisher Plaza’s basement garage, however, destroyed the connection between the city’s power and the building. In February 2006, as I described in an article at the time, we upgraded Windows Secrets’ server equipment and relocated it to a secure carrier hotel in Seattle named Fisher Plaza. INTRODUCTION Fire at Web host affected Windows SecretsĪ serious electrical fire cut power to a large Web hosting company in Seattle, knocking numerous sites off the Internet on July 3 and the early hours of July 4, including .Īll of Windows Secrets’ data was fully backed up, and all subscriptions will continue just as before the power outage, but it took longer to get our site back online than I’d like.
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