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Jun. 2, 2008

Dedicated hosting provider The Planet suffered a major explosion at 4:55 pm CST on Saturday at its H1 data center in Houston, which led to an outage that affected approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers.

The explosion and accompanying fire knocked down three walls surrounding the facility's electrical equipment room, as well as destroyed the underground cabling that powers the first floor of the facility.

After the fire marshall inspected the facility The Planet was allowed to restore power to the facility. The company immediately turned back on the generators to receive power on the second floor.

The company has been in a frantic communication mode with its customers -- an essential aspect of any disaster recovery plan -- through its forum and customer portal.

In an earlier post yesterday on The Planet's forums, Kevin Hazard said the "short was in a high-volume wire conduit" and that the fire department instructed the company to not "activate its backup generator plan."

Then, earlier this morning, the company successfully brought back 90 percent of the second floor servers after more than forty hours of troubleshooting.

Meanwhile, support technicians are currently working on location to manually restore the remaining ten percent on the second floor, as well as restore power to the first floor.

Despite this, many customers, namely those companies who have lost sales, customers, and other revenues, remain upset by how long the recovery process is taking and have actively voiced these criticisms on forums.

One WHT member writes: "I'm fed up waiting for more information about these terrifying issues. Communication is poor and every minute my site is down is costing me $1000s in ad revenues. This is probably going to cost me a $10,000,000 sponsorship deal with a major brand advertiser."

Douglas Erwin, The Planet chairman and CEO, responded to these complaints late Sunday evening onThe Planet forum.

He writes: "I would like to extend my sincere thanks for your patience during the past 28 hours. We are acutely aware that uptime is critical to your business, and you have my personal commitment that The Planet team will continue to work around the clock to restore your service.

"We understand that you will be due service credits based on our Service Level Agreement. We will proactively begin providing those following the restoration of service, which is our number one priority, so please bear with us until this has been completed."

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Source: The Planet.