Sorry about the slow site access the last couple days. The main Houston data center of The Planet, which hosts StatCounter’s servers, suffered a catastrophic explosion in the electrical equipment room late Saturday. The good news is nobody was hurt, and none of The Planet’s customers’ servers was lost. The bad is the explosion and fire destroyed much of the electrical wiring. While the counter here was not on one of the very-affected partitions (i.e. I believe I only lost a few hours’ worth of stats, which is nothing since it was a Saturday night), the performance is still suffering because of the jury-rigged backup plan that StatCounter had to go to.
There’s more from The Planet here, and more from StatCounter here.
Revisions/extensions (1:29 pm 6/2/2008) – There’s also an unusual server load on the BlueHost box this site’s on. I don’t know if it’s this place or somebody else on the box.
R&E part 2 (3:41 pm 6/3/2008) – Thanks to Jen for pointing me to the wrap from StatCounter.
Egad…this is a datacenter’s WORST nightmare….a fire/explosion and NOT being able to go to backup generator!!!
My heart and sympathies got out to all of those IS guys….and I’m sure alot of Mountain Dew was consumed over the last 48 hours…..
Hi Steve,
Please accept my apologies for the difficulties in recent days – we are desperately sorry for the interruption in service. Everything is back up and full info is available on our blog:
http://blog.statcounter.com/?p=91
Thanks for your patience. All the best!
Not a problem on my end. I just keep an eye on the stats out of curiosity.