ulyssesonline.com

I recently consolidated two of my websites into one. I have accounts with IPowerWeb and Dreamhost. About a week ago, I’ve decided to stay with Dreamhost and cancel my IPowerweb account for numerous reasons which I don’t want to elaborate at this time. Plus the fact that my IPowerWeb account is due to expire September 15 – a perfect opportunity not to continue.

The news today made me think if I made the right decision. This afternoon, there was a power outage in LA and I can no longer get to my homepage. You probably are asking how this event is related to my webpages? Well, it is. Both hosting companies have data centers in the Southern California area. You can read the Dreamhost blogs about the power failure here and here.

The irony is Dreamhost servers were down and IPowerWeb servers were up. Oops. What happened here? It is just a minor inconvenience for me since my website does not generate revenue. If it did, then I would be worried.

I can think of two reasons why I couldn’t reach Dreamhost.

1. Backup emergency generators? What happened? Did it run out of gas? You can read what happened here
2. Another possibility is the blackout took down a major Internet trunk in the LA area, not Dreamhost’s fault.

As it turns out, the three network providers Level 3, Global Crossing, and Mzima for Dreamhost were all down. So much for redundancy. When major power outage occurs, no amount of emergency planning can prevent an outage such as this unless a company is willing to pay millions of dollars for fault tolerant systems which is usually passed down to consumers. Even with fault tolerant systems, something always goes wrong.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...