Pinedale Online offline
Explosion and fire at web hosting provider in Texas brings down 9,000 servers
by Dawn Ballou, Editor, Pinedale Online!
June 2, 2008
Pinedale Online went offline Saturday afternoon when there was an explosion and fire at our Texas-based server hosting provider. Apparently an electrical gear shorted at their facility in Houston around 5:00 PM Saturday causing an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding their electrical equipment room. No injuries were reported and no servers were damaged or data lost. The explosion caused server outages affecting 7,500 customers and 9,000 servers. The company had its entire technical support team working around the clock to get servers back online.
Wind River Web Services LLC, the parent company of Pinedale Online, has multiple servers with this web server hosting company. This resulted in a number of our Pinedale area websites being down as a result of the power outage resulting from the explosion and fire at this facilities. The company had 90% of their customer’s servers back online by early Monday morning, which brought many of our customers back online. Our Pinedale Online website remained down through part of Monday, along with our ability to send and receive e-mail through our main contact e-mail addresses.
Wind River Web Services has worked with this provider for ten years and they have a very good up-time record. This is the only time in working with this company that they have been down for more than a couple of hours for the services they provide us. This incident illustrates the challenges of keeping web-based services online in the situation of a catastrophic event. None of our customer websites or data were damaged. The hosting company, and we, are actively doing everything we can looking at additional technological answers to prevent a situation like this from taking us down for so long in the event a situation like this happens in the future.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this outage may have caused our customers. For more information, please contact Dawn Ballou, Pinedale Online/Wind River Web Services, 307-276-5699 or 307-360-7689, support@pinedaleonline.com.
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