Some brief comments regarding the website outage on Wednesday, August 10, 2011.
DVCNews.com was unavailable most of the day on August 10. The reason for the outage was a power failure a firm called Colo4 out of Dallas, Texas. Colo4 is a "colocation" firm which essenitally hosts and maintains web servers and other mainframes.
The power loss occurred shortly before 1pm EST and lasted until around 7:30pm. The outage impacted literally thousands of websites and businesses around the world.
Once power was restored, that left dozens--perhaps hundreds--of servers to be restarted. Restarting a server after an unexpected shut-down is no simple task. Each unit will run through a series of file checking and repair routines to verify the condition of its data. Many individual servers required component replacements due to physical damage caused by the power spikes.
Approximately 5am on Thursday, August 11 DVCNews.com was restored. So far we have not detected any lingering issues related to the outage.
The outage itself was more than a bit distressing and we will certainly be monitoring the steps Colo4 and other entities plan to take in order to prevent a similar occurrence.
Thanks to everyone for their patience through this ordeal.
-- Tim
