Snow World

Another DataCenter outage due to accidents, this time an electrical fire from ThePlanet, that houses Entrecard.com among the other 9000++ websites hosted.

But what I want to point out here are the following:

Follow up:

• Entrecard hosting their Email Database elsewhere - in this case “iContact". Thus enabling them to email blast even if the datacenter is offline
• A quick update and response from Entrecard is a big plus

Good work Entrecard Team!

The email from Entrecard quoted below:

Greetings,

Unfortunately, there has been an electrical fire at the data center housing Entrecard’s servers. The servers have not been damaged, but the site may be down for as long as 12 hours.

Entrecard is hosted with ThePlanet, and this fire has effected over 9000 websites, as many of the world’s most popualar websites are hosted with ThePlanet. They are working around the clock to get their data center back online, and we are hoping that they get it back online fast.

Thank you for your pateince and understanding with this rare and frustrating problem. Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing we can do but wait for The Planet to get their datacenter back online.

Please check back with Entrecard in 12 to 24 hours.

Thanks,
Entrecard Team

UPDATE (2008-06-02 MONDAY): Credit of excellent customer support in times of problems also goes to ThePlanet IDC (Internet DataCenter) for updating customers every 15mins to 1 hour about the situation, the status, and what steps are being taken to restore services as soon as possible, which affected 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers.

From Doug Erwin:
This evening at 4:55pm CDT 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 I apologize for the impact.

If you want to be updated directly, visit: their customer support forums.

Keep up the good work!