Linux and Windows Web Site Hosting by HostSonic.com

Here you will find our latest news concerning our services and other important topics.

Jun 17, 2008 2:29 PM

Switch to Normal Electrical Power

The datacenter will be switching all servers back to normal electrical power on Friday, June 19th. There is no expected downtime during the switch over. Successful switchover to electrical power will conclude a 2 week odyssey which began with an explosion and fire in the datacenter which resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage.

Jun 4, 2008 11:10 AM

Server #1012 DNS Updated

The dns resolvers on server1012 were not working properly, so we have updated the resolv.conf file and restarted the dns software. If you are on server#1012 and have been having mail problems, this should resolve the issue. If you use Outlook or a similar program, you may wish to close it down and reopen it or even reboot your pc for best chance at success of reading the new resolvers.

Jun 4, 2008 10:17 AM

Datacenter Update (10:17am)

The datacenter is now powering 100% of servers with generator power. The second floor group (where our servers are located) is running off of permanent generator power (that is, the onsite generators which are present 24/7 for power emergencies). Floor #1 is running off of a mobile/portable generator due to the damage to the power wiring in floor #1.

We continue to see occasional "blips" in connectivity. These short outages last just seconds in most cases and most people do not even notice them. We expect that this will continue for at least another week to 10 days as the datacenter must rebuild the electrical room of the generator.

We have also noticed occasional SMTP time out errors. This is due to the dns servers which the datacenter uses which has had some problems due to a brief period of not having been updated. We expect that situation to improve steadily over the coming days.

All things considered, we are satisfied with the performance of our servers and the network at this time. If you notice any problems, please send an emal to support@hostsonic.com or open a ticket at http://www.hostsonic.com/hd/

Jun 3, 2008 11:55 AM

Datacenter Update

Further details from the datacenter have cleared up a few hazy areas we were unsure about. The entire datacenter is on backup power at this time. There are two groups of servers in the datacenter, First Floor and Second Floor groups. All of our servers are located in the second floor group.

The second floor group is being powered by the existing (permanent) generators at the datacenter. Because the damage to the first floor wiring was so severe, the datacenter had to bring in a mobile generator for the first floor group. That generator has since had problems and the first floor group has gone dark again.

We feel very fortunate that our servers are all located together in the second floor group which seems to be having fewer issues than the first floor group.

The problems being experienced by the first floor group are a reminder that this issue is still fluid at the datacenter. While we have had continuous uninterrupted power for well over 24 hours, we feel that we are not out of the woods yet. The datacenter still needs to rebuild the electrical room so that permanent power can be restored to the entire datacenter.

We appreciate your patience during this time. If you have any questions, please let us know.

Jun 3, 2008 12:13 AM

Power Outage Summary

Current status report. All of our servers are online and have been online since approx. 6am EST on Monday. There are some latency issues (slow), but this is expected to begin getting better on Tuesday morning.

The entire datacenter is running on generator power and will continue to run on generator power for the next 10-12 days. The electrical room (which exploded) needs to be rebuilt. Once all of the replacement parts are in, the electrical room will be rebuilt. At that time, there is an expected outage of approximately 4-6 hours which will take place while they hard-wire all of the servers back onto the main site electrical power grid. A probable date for this will be June 14th (a Saturday).

I am not sure if our customers understand the gravity of what happened this weekend. This incident looked extremely grim. There was some amount of time during which we did not know whether the servers had survived the fire. The explosion completely destroyed the electrical room wiring under the floor of the datacenter. But still, the datacenter was able to get all sites back up and operating on generator power within 48 hours. Considering the scope of the damage from the explosion and fire, this was truly an amazing feat.

A customer asked today if we have off-site backup data. The answer is "yes", we do keep backups of all customer web site and sql data off site for disaster purposes. The servers are in Texas and the backup data is in Georgia. To play the "what if" game, if our servers had been destroyed in the fire this weekend, we could have simply requisitioned a new server, and then upload all customer site & sql backups from off site storage. Fortunately, we did not need to restore any backups at all as our servers were not damaged. When the datacenter powered up Monday morning, our servers came to life and have been doing great since then.

Expect the pace of updates to slow now that things are at least partially back to normal. If you have any issues, questions or comments, please send them via email to support@hostsonic.com or call us at 888.368.7873.

Jun 2, 2008 4:17 PM

Saturday Power Outage

An explosion and fire in our Houston datacenter caused a power outage which last for over 36 hours. Our servers are back online under generator power. For full details, please visit the front page of www.hostsonic.com/

May 14, 2008 2:44 PM

Server 1012 Reboot

We are rebooting server #1012 at this time because of a software update.

Mar 29, 2008 7:43 AM

Server 1011 Reboot

Server 1011 has been online for 78 days without a reboot. Thus, we will be rebooting this server this morning. It will take about 5 minutes for the reboot process to complete.

Nov 8, 2007 10:21 AM

Server 1012 Cpanel Update

The reboot has completed successfully. We are not updating the Cpanel software to the latest version. If you log into cpanel during this time, you may experience strange behavior.

Nov 8, 2007 9:26 AM

Server 1012 Reboot

Server 1012 has been online without reboot for 82 days. We will be doing a routine reboot on this server today at 9:45 AM EST. Your site may appear down for a few minutes as the server resets itself.

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