Bravo Advisory: FELI Outage

From the desk of: Sam C. Chan

Bravo/Mach 4 Network Advisory: Hosting Outage

Sunday June 1, 2008 4:45am EDT (GMT-4)
SEE ALSO: Current Recovery Status & Your Options

At 5:55pm EDT on Saturday May 31, 2008, our datacenter, The Planet, located at Houston, Texas, USA had an explosion that destroyed three walls and numerous network apparatus, and resulted in a fire. The entire facility was evacuated. Thankfully, no one was injured and no servers were harmed. Currently, 9000 servers are down due to power outage and network damage, affecting over half a million web sites worldwide.

At 11:46pm EDT, The Planet team was allowed into the facility to physically inspect damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. However, they were not allowed to activate backup generator plan, per fire department order.

The entire datacenter crisis team including management and all suppliers are on-site and recovery plans are in motion there. We have activated contingency plans on our end as well. All our own Bravo critical sites have been rerouted to our redundant server in Lenexa, KS. Appropriate capacity has been reserved to provide similar services to clients should they elect to implement it.

This is a developing situation. I've been in close contact with the datacenter and will continue to monitor the situation closely, and act accordingly as events unfold. Clients will be notified and options presented on Monday.

This is a major (although not catastrophic) and extraordinary incident. We apologize for any inconvenience it might have caused. Further update will be posted on the Recovery Status page. Don't forget to refresh your browser to avoid stale pages. Sometimes Ctrl-Refresh is required to force it, depending on your settings.

Highlights of the World-Class Hosting Capabilities at The Planet:

Number 1 privately held dedicated server hosting provider in the world
- with more than 500 employees (second only to publicly held IBM)
Fourth largest hosting provider of web sites
- hosting 3.1 million web sites total
Serving more than 22,000 businesses worldwide
- 40 percent outside of North America
Six wholly owned and managed state-of-the-art data centers
- 2 in Houston, 4 in Dallas
- containing more than 48,000 servers
- housed in 155,000 sq. ft. of raised floor space with 12,000 sq. ft. expansion capability
Fully redundant Network Operations Center capabilities from two cities, 24 x 7 x 365 monitoring
One of the industry's fastest, most robust networks
- 100 gigabit/second multi-carrier backbone connection

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