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The Planet Houston Data Center Goes Up in a Puff of Smoke

By Alan Gray, NewsBlaze  

Tonight at 5:45 p.m. in Houston, Texas, a transformer in The Planet H1 datacenter caught fire. The fire department required them to take down all generators.

This significant outage is impacting around 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers.

Luckily, there were no injuries. It is now known that there was an explosion that knocked down three walls surrounding the electrical equipment room.

All servers in the H1 data center are down. This was the EV1servers old datacenter, that houses the main name servers for many of the dedicated hosting servers, we well as the ServerCommand customer portal, that legacy Ev1servers customers use to control their servers and add domain records.

The name servers and the ServerCommand system were still down, five hours later. ThePlanet staff said they are working to move the ServerCommand and the Name Servers to another data center.

According to staff, their management team and facilities staff are on site evaluating the situation.

"In our latest assessment, we have determined that networking gear has not been damaged, but we are without power so assessments continue. All disaster recovery systems are in motion, and we have teams already working in the data center."

According to customer support, one of their forum threads is being used to keep customers informed.

They report that their new Orbit system is not affected.

When NewsBlaze asked, they said "According to the last update, power should be restored in the data center tomorrow afternoon."

It is to be hoped they improve their disaster recovery plans after this. Having nameservers that control domains in other datacenters should not be a difficult problem to overcome.

Editor's Note:Monday morning June 2: NewsBlaze was down most of the day Sunday. DNS cache kept us up for a while, but unfortunately, not long enough. If you tried Sunday and are now seeing this, thank you for your persistence.

Wednesday June 5: There are some DNS issues. DNS is a wonderful thing when it is left alone, but when there are changes, watch out for it to cause problems for several days.

Thursday June 6: Finally, it looks like DNS has settled down. Hopefully, I will be checking up on The Planet to ensure they maintain geographically separate name servers and we will work on setting up a secondary DNS.

Please let us know how this outage affected you at contact@newsblaze.com

Thank you for being a NewsBlaze Friend, we really appreciate you and thank you for telling all your friends we're back up again, it really helps.