Aug 18 2003
Impressive Outage Performance for Hosting Providers
Last Thrusday’s power outage in the NorthEast US and SouthEastern Canada may have put the spotlight on how badly our power infrastructure needs to be updated, but something a lot of people didn’t notice was how well Internet hosting providers in those areas held up even without their most critical resource: electricity.
If you remember the hours and days after 9/11, there were a number of problems with hosting providers in the area because they didn’t have the necessary backup proceedures or equipment in place. Sites like Yahoo, Merril Lynch, and CNN were all affected by a lack of preparedness from their respective hosting providers.
So it’s pretty nice to see that when the power went out in such a large area at the end of last week, the major hosting players were ready for it this time, most of them reporting seemless transition to their backup power systems.
Of course, these bigger companies are supposed to have emergency power facilities, usually in the form of diesel generators, on hand as it’s one of their main selling points. One of Toronto’s biggest hosting providers, peer1.net, even helped the Toronto Star, one of Canada’s largest daily newspapers, help publish a special edition Friday by sharing power from its generators. Peer1 allowed the newspaper to set up a mini-command center within their facility, which permitted approximately 80 journalists to file their stories and transmit them via the Internet to the Star’s printing facility.
That kind of story is something that makes a lot of sense if you think about it. The more and more our society depends on the online world, the more the people that make that online world happen behind the scenes will be seen as the ‘go-to’ facilities in terms of availability and resources. Many of these facilities are built to withstand almost every natural disaster and to be totally self sustaining for an extended period of time, which isn’t something you can say about a lot of places any more.
I expect there’s a lot of shifting of hosting providers this week by companies who were promised “99.9999% uptime with multiple backup generators!!” by hosting providers in the affected area, but who failed to see those promises kept.
