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Topic: Dodged that bullet! (Read 145 times)
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ZboX
Founder
Administrator
Posting Maniac
 Offline
Posts: 1583
What 'ya got there??
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On Saturday May 31st a transformer in the electrical room of the old DAP datacenter exploded knocking out three walls to the electrical room and causing a large fire. Fortunately no personnel were injured and no servers and like hardware were damaged. This is the datacenter where Ides, Mabel, Craig, Jasper and Boojum, were housed. Because of the scale of the incident, local emergency services were involved and the entire facility evacuated and shut down. The incident brought to light a design flaw in the facility itself. One electrical room to power everything. The result of that design flaw brought about a down time for the majority of the servers in the facility (most likely including our old ones) of five days. Yah that made me gasp too! The explosion basically caused the entire inbound (yes even from the backup generators) electrical system to be destroyed. The inbound electrical system of the facility is currently being rebuilt and 99 percent of the 10's of thousands of the servers housed there are now back online. Albeit on generator power until they can rebuild the inbound electrical system.
Why am I telling you this? Because in this industry "stuff happens". No datacenter can ever guarantee 100 percent uptime. Ever. No hosting company can ever guarantee 100 percent uptime. Ever. There is a thing in this industry called a "single point of failure". That's what happened to the old DAP datacenter. A single electrical room with no fallover plan = single point of failure. A webhosting company running their servers with no backup hard drive = single point of failure. I've seen Raid array's die. That can be messy. It can take several days to rebuild the Raid array. I've seen the main hard drive fail on a two hard drive system (one main drive and one for backup). Minimum downtime for that would be around 5 hours. And sometimes you can't avoid a single point of failure, at least if you are a small fish like myself. So what do you do then? Backup your backups.
For ZboX the datacenter is located in Los Angeles. The obvious catastrophe that could happen there is an earthquake. The datacenter ZboX is housed in is rated to withstand an earthquake of magnitude 8.0. But what if it's a 8.1 or a 9.0? We don't know. But an earthquake that large would take out a major hub for internet traffic, which would effect a major portion of the country. But, the servers at ZboX are backed up to a server in a different datacenter in the midwest. So if the big one in Los Angeles happens, we'll be able to bring them back on different servers in a different datacenter. Obviously that could take a while, but the option is there.
We are doing the same for DAP. All files are being backed up in a different datacenter on the east coast while Capricorn is housed in Chicago. Just in case. Apparently datacenters can explode. And frankly we don't want to explode. So with the resources we have, we are trying to avoid that single point of failure.
Not trying to scare anyone here, but I'm just sayin. LOL!
Backups are the key. PC users with Cpanel accounts can easily backup their files to their hard drives. Webtv users can zip important files and beam them over to other hosts.
Having all of your eggs in one basket is never a good idea.
~;-)
Bert
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mistymage
ZboXian
Offline
Posts: 14
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I wonder 1) if you would even want to do this and 2) how much would it cost to have my site zipped and placed on a disk to be mailed to me.
Not that my site is uber special and not that I couldn't do it myself.. but I do have some Sims1 stuff up that, since Sims 3 is around the corner, is just about irreplaceable (the creator doesn't create any more, the stuff might be at other sites but not as easily accessible as my site.. and I like the visitor hits  and... I'm kinda lazy plus my connection can be darned slow when downloading stuff at times.
I'm thinking maybe $10 .. which should cover the disk and postage.. but might shortchange you on $/time spent doing it/handling it. Something for you to think about, anyway.
Maybe if I get off my butt and revamp my site a bit.. then I'll get around to saving it for posterior.. errr posterity.
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