ThePlanet DC is reliable ? Really ? What you think ?

Well, seems they had a major outage this morning. I just now was able to login here.

The network outage we had this morning is making me question it's reliability.

guys, everyone has outages.

True, it happens. But those of us that consider our uptime a very important part of providing a reliable service see any downtime, no matter how insignificant, a failure of providing a high level of service.

How many servers were affected by this last outage? Does anyone have a link to the incident report?

It must have been quite a few considering the amount of providers noting the outage on WHT and other forums.

I hate them. Outages happened way too often.

Recently made a switch to a new host and personally I think the lower prices are giving me even better service. Who would have thought?

I might give some other hosts a try but for now I am sticking with MyHosting.

Most people automatically assume low cost hosts are unreliable and that you pay for what you get. It's not necessarily true. There are plenty of high cost hosting companies out there that provide lousy service as well as good service. The same can be said for the lower costing companies as well.

Glad to near you found a low cost host that you found reliable and are happy with.

For The Planet incident, there's been nothing OFFICIALLY released yet. There were TWO incidents. Once about 11:45pm Central Time which resulted in about an hour outage in the H1 facility. This was scheduled maintenance and a window of 7 hours was opened for this event, however it was not supposed to go offline.

The second incident happened at around 7:30am Central time and lasted at least an hour also. This even took down both the H1 and H2 facilities and has been attributed to a router in the network.

This took down thousands of servers (actual number not known). It also took out ALL of HostGator as their servers are in the H1 facility.

For us, it took down a couple hundred servers as not only do we have machines in both the H1 and H2 facility, but our DNS servers are located in each of these buildings (along with the Dallas servers).

We have setup external routing through another datacenter in order to get sites back online and functional.

Support at The Planet has been going down hill steadily since late 2009 for us. It is one of the primary reasons that we have moved hundreds of servers to alternate facilities. When you're spending $xx,xxx per month in hosting fees, you'd expect to be treated a little differently, and we were for many years, but for the past 8 months it's been a struggle even to get someone to call me back. My sales rep has all but fallen off the map with the occassional email about a special, but it used to be a monthly call organizing new servers etc.

The sales reps I have at two other facilities call me on a regular basis and we have a great relationship.

What frustrated me most about The Planet is that they had setup an external site last year when they had a major outage and used that site to keep everyone updated. Also updated via Twitter. This time however, the "status" site was gone, and nobody responding via Twitter at all. The main page offline, forums offline, phone numbers jammed, orbit offline - you name it. Very poor communication in this kind of event, which left us sitting on our hands here as we couldn't update our own customers either!

We used to use The Planet and then switched to Softlayer - I'd recommend you take a look at them if you are looking for a dedicated server

The Planet has a nice network, but occasionally it fails like today. A few people I've known have been screwed over by The Planet's billing techniques. I would recommend looking else where such as SoftLayer or ServerBeach.

I agree, Conor. Downtime understandably happens, but not having any means of knowing what the status was during this outage and keeping everyone in the dark like that was bad business.

The sad thing is that they learned this lesson last year, and again the year before when the center blew up, and 2 years prior when there was a huge issue in Dallas (I believe a truck hit a power transformer if I remember right), and years prior to that when RackShack and EV1 were involved (yes, I've been a client since way back then!).

I was invited two years ago to a round table discussion in Houston with the CEO and various other staff members along with about a dozen other of their larger customers, and the echos through the meeting were the needs for more communication. If I enter a reboot ticket, I need a response on there to say "I'm doing that now" and not sit here waiting for 30 minutes, HOPING that someone is doing something and there was an error. Too many times have I had tickets going up to 30 hours because of lack of updates by staff.

This incident is again another chance at a learning lesson, but I fear that there will be little learned (again). An outage like this will not put them out of business and to say something like that would be absurd, however repeated incidents (without communication) will release them from *MY* business.

My issue was not so much that there was an event - it sucks, but that happens - the issue that I hold them accountable for is the lack of updates or notification regarding the event.

Then you should be redundant yourself as well. There is no such thing as 100% uptime. No matter how redundant your provider is, things are going to break. It just happens.

That said, anyone who relies on their servers being up should have them in more than one place.