Steve's personal blog

Apologies for the recent outages on a number of the Analysis UK websites, these included BookSwap.ws, Dollars2Pounds, Pounds2Euro and all the other exchange rate sites as well as this blog.

On Saturday the hosting provider had an explosion and fire at one of it's data centers hosting one of servers. Initial estimates that were given made it look like it would be quicker to leave the sites (it was a Sunday and their usually quiet on Sundays) and wait for the host to get the power back on.

Unfortunately it didn’t resolve that well, after many hours of delays some power was restored but floor 1 had even more damage than was anticipated and power was much slower at being restored, this unfortunately eat into most of Monday (UK time), however Monday evening all was back and well.

I got home Tuesday tonight to find yet another apology from the company saying that this time the generator powering floor 1 had failed and they were sourcing a new one, this took a significant amount of time, especially given how much they like to state N+1 redundancy (i.e. a spare generator should have been to hand anyway). Updates were slow, uninformative, vague and at the point of being misleading – I’ve have yet to see any photo's of anything as well. Eventually power returned at about midnight UK time on Tuesday/Wednesday, so fingers crossed nothing else can go wrong in this world class N+1 redundancy data center!

Sincere apologies to all those affected, this one is going firmly into the experience category and I’m extremely unhappy this has taken so long to resolve, I will look to do more to improve this and hopefully The Planet will learn and improve (if they have any customers left after this!).

I read on GoDaddy some time ago about a problem they had and that they didn’t have geographical redundancy, if your running a serious e-commerce operation and have enough cash for some spare servers get them now and with a different host in a different [part of the] country.

BTW - If you have .co.uk domain names with GoDaddy be sure to renew them extra early as they claim they have to renew them at least a month early, then before the 20th of that month (unless I was getting some BS from the customer support as to why they canceled 4 of my domains over 1 month before the renewal date!).