Neowins previous web servers host, ThePlanet based in Dallas Texas, suffered a major setback yesterday as an electrical fire allegedly caused an explosion, knocking out around 9000 of their customers hosted websites.
Marcus Langenveld writes: "Apparently there was an electrical fire at ThePlanet"s H1 data center in Houston Texas. According to some sources there was an actual explosion powerful enough that it knocked down walls in an equipment room. So far there are no reports of damage to servers or networking equipment but power is offline at the facility and approximately 9000 websites are affected. This will surely be all over the tech news websites by morning. You got that right! - Ed.
Update
Just over an hour ago staff member, Todd Mitchell posted an update on the situation:
Morning,We are continuing to work through various issues this morning. We will have additional contractors on-site this morning starting at approx. 7 AM. Some will hand-off from contractors who worked overnight and others will start the recovery/installation of new electrical gear to power the data center.
We are still working through the EV1 DNS and ServerCommand items. We are making progress on both items and expect to have both functional within the next 120 minutes.
In addition to the above, the network engineering group worked overnight to prepare the network for the recovery of H1. We expect the reconvergence of the network to go smooth once H1 comes back online.
We do not have an Estimated Time to Repair at present; we should have a better estimate this morning. Our staff and management continue to work through the night and morning-- we will continue to provide hourly updates.
Todd