Anyone who tried to visit P-L yesterday (August 10, 2011) found the site off-line. The reason for the outage is an interesting one. For some time P-L has used one of the best VPS hosting companies in the industry for our site. Since migrating to KnownHost our downtime and site performance has been stellar and was vastly improved over the shared hosting we used previously. KnownHost provides physical servers in several geographic locations around the US and supports customers across the globe with some of their customers being very large organizations. Our account with KnownHost uses physical servers in their Dallas, Texas data center. KnownHost, in turn, uses a data center service in Dallas for co-location of physical equipment from a company called Colo4.
Yesterday Colo4 suffered a fairly serious problem with the equipment supplying power to the physical servers in the data center. Unfortunately, our VPS host, KnownHost, was affected by this power loss. Our site was down from just before Noon (Eastern time) till well after Midnight and into the early morning hours of August 11, 2011 before the site was finally restored.
As I understand it there may be some brief outages in the future, hopefully scheduled around 'quiet' times, as equipment is swapped in and out - though it may have no effect if done correctly.
There are some interesting lessons to be learned from this episode - not only for the companies that host our site - but also for anyone who depends upon, or promotes, redundant systems for mission critical reliability. While it is an inconvenience and annoyance for a site like P-L to be offline for some hours - the impacts to some other organizations was potentially devastating.
You can read more about the events at these links:
Colo4 --
https://accounts.colo4.com/status/ KnownHost --
http://forums.knownhost.com/showthread.php?t=3184 Web Hosting Talk --
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1072692 - Dan
