Last week my blog server was down.
It turned out to be an unusual underground fire in Baltimore.

The severity of the fire caused the city to shut down both our primary and secondary power grids. Our NOC was able to use our battery back-up system in the initial hours to allow us to bring all servers down slowly to avoid a hard crash. Because of the risk of explosion BG&E also asked not to use our backup generator until late afternoon.

One World monitored the situation and tried our best to keep our phone lines answered by live technicians rather than by a recorded message or a busy signal. We do apologize if you were unable to reach us, but we were able to answer approximately 10-12 calls every minute for over 6 hours.

II. Steps We’re Taking Now for the Future

First, you can always call us in case of any emergency. We have added capacity to our telephone system today, and we’ll be able to handle even more calls in the future.

Second, within the next 48 hours, we will have a new status and emergency report site available here: 1worldhosting.com. This site will be hosted independent of oneworldhosting.com, and will be an additional source for information.

Third, we’ve taken steps to update our 800 directory listing, and our oneworldhosting.com Whois record to include our 800 support number and additional information.

We would like to thank all of our customers for the calm and gracious way you handled this difficult situation.

Sincerely,

The Staff at One World Hosting

(I suspect some of the customers were not calm and gracious)
You don’t know what you got til it’s gone.
The hosting company was given just enough time to shut down safely.

Technorati was down this weekend because of an electrical fire in San Francisco, and ran into problems the backups to backups couldn’t overcome.
All the best laid plans of mice and men….Dave Sifry writes a non-techy couple of posts on what went on. His concern and appreciation for his staff is outstanding. And in keeping customers informed, he gives others the opportunity to understand and cut him some slack. We expect the internet and it’s sites to be at our beck and call. And when something takes that luxury away, it is good to know people are doing their best, and it’s smart business to keep customers in the loop.