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

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 [email protected]

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.

Alan Gray is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of NewsBlaze Daily News and other online newspapers. He prefers to edit, rather than write, but sometimes an issue rears it’s head and makes him start hammering away on the keyboard.

Content Expertise

Alan has been on the internet since it first started. He loves to use his expertise in content and digital marketing to help businesses grow, through managed content services. After living in the United States for 15 years, he is now in South Australia. To learn more about how Alan can help you with content marketing and managed content services, contact him by email.

Technical Expertise

Alan is also a techie. His father was a British soldier in the 4th Indian Division in WWII, with Sikhs and Gurkhas. He was a sergeant in signals and after that, he was a printer who typeset magazines and books on his linotype machine. Those skills were passed on to Alan and his brothers, who all worked for Telecom Australia, on more advanced signals (communications). After studying electronics, communications, and computing at college, and building and repairing all kinds of electronics, Alan switched to programming and team building and management.

He has a fascination with shooting video footage and video editing, so watch out if he points his Canon 7d in your direction.