EV1Servers, now part of ThePlanet after last year merger, experienced Saturday afternoon a major downtime on their Huston H1 datacenter: electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding their electrical equipment room. No one was injured and apparently no server damaged or lost. Still they were not allowed to bring up their backup power equipment resulting in (all the datacenter servers being down of course):

• approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 clients were affected
• their own management servers, EV1Severs domain management, and SSL management; also their client management and communication tool ServerCommand was in the same situation;
• ev1servers.net nameservers and the H1 resolvers: 207.218.192.38 and 207.218.192.39 were down also (affecting other clients that might had those configured). Also the ones with the domain hosted on ev1 infrastructure, even if they had their server up were not functional because of dns problems.

At this time about 90% of the servers are up, but they are still working to bring up the rest.

So far, The Planet has been managing the situation as a whole quite well, by addressing the issues in a transparent and also timely manner. ThePlanet/Ev1 support team published updates during this period on their status page and also on their forum; also phone greetings recordings reported the status of the problem.

This post is sponsored by Canadian Web Hosting – Hosting in Canada. VPS and dedicated servers. 24/7 Toll free support.
I’ve been asked to review and give hosting advice many times. Still, this is the first time I will publish something like this on my blog, as opposed to do it for a client and help him choose the best datacenter for his business.

Pricing: 4 / 5
Features: 3 / 5
Reliability: 2 / 5
Customer support: 4 / 5
Web Site: 3 / 5

Overall: 3,2 / 5

Canadian Web Hosting is a Canadian owned and operated web hosting business that has been online since 1998. They provide low cost web hosting solutions without compromising quality. Their servers are located at Harbour Center in downtown Vancouver, BC, Canada.

This review will focus on pricing, features, reliability, customer support and web site. Read the rest of this entry »

If a single dedicated server is no longer meeting your needs, or you just expect (or hope ) that this will happen in the future, then you might find this information useful. I had so many problems scaling a site to more than one dedicated server, but this was not caused by technical problems to implement load-balancing, failover, or redundant solutions. The main problem that I have faced was caused by various datacenters that are not able to help in such situations. Read the rest of this entry »

This month’s question: “Where is your dedicated server hosted?”
I have added the datacenters where the servers that I manage are hosted:

• ThePlanet: www.theplanet.com
• EV1Servers: www.ev1servers.net
• LayeredTech: www.layeredtech.com
• Steadfast: www.steadfast.net
• Rackspace: www.rackspace.com
• 1&1: www.1and1.com
• iPowerWeb: www.ipowerweb.com

If you want me to add a datacenter to the poll list just add a comment bellow.

Let see which datacenter holds the most servers among this site readers.

Update 20060710: added ServerBeach at Vinay Arora’s recommendation. Thanks.

Update 20060802: this poll is now closed. Thanks for your votes. You can see the results of the poll here: 200607 Poll Results.