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A couple of months ago, one of Rackspace’s data centers ran into trouble when a truck crashed into a power transformer and caused a major power outage. In general, power outages are a frequent cause of data center trouble and other service interruptions. Even if safeguards are in place, there is always a chance that [...]
We have gathered 13 of the most notable internet-related outages and incidents of 2007. Why 13? Though you usually can’t blame downtime on bad luck, we thought it was an appropriate number for a collection like this. Now on to the list! The Great Skype Outage Anyone using Skype will remember this one. Back in [...]
The team at Pingdom would like to wish you all Happy Holidays (and a less politically correct Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year as well!) A list of advice… If you and your colleagues plan on being away from the office like the rest of the population, but still have a service or site [...]
120 billion spam emails. Taste that number. That is how many waste-of-space, soul-sucking, worthless emails pollute the internet every single day. We sampled the not-inconsiderable amount of spam our office mail server gets hammered with every day to estimate the average size of a spam email, which happens to be 4.27 kilobytes (based on a [...]
We had a look at what kind of uptime guarantees web hosting companies are offering. Especially, how bad they can get. In doing this, we found several examples of web hosting companies that only offer a 95% uptime guarantee. Numbers like that don’t exactly inspire confidence. Why? Have a look below. With 95% uptime, how [...]
Bink.nu has published some really interesting numbers about Microsoft’s IT infrastructure. Here is a summary with some additional analysis. Inside Microsoft Internally, Microsoft has 10,000 servers in 3 data centers and one operations center. 6 million internal emails per day. 20 million emails from the internet, of which 97% are rejected as spam. Interestingly, if [...]
Rackspace, known for its 100% uptime guarantee, had problems last night when servers in their Dallas data center had to be taken offline for a couple of hours. The reason for the outage was a car accident where a truck drove into a power transformer, which exploded. This caused a major power disruption. When Rackspace’s [...]
It seems that people are running web servers on basically any hardware they can get their hands on. This is a list of some very unconventional choices of web server hardware. Spud: Potato-powered web server Need we say more? Apparently they ran into problems with rotting potatoes. webACE – World’s smallest web server webACE claims [...]
Selecting a location for a data center can be a complicated issue with a lot of factors involved. John Rath from the Data Center Information blog has written a white paper about data center site selection that should be a good starting point if you are in the US. Above: The US sure has a [...]
We recently blogged about some statistics we have collected on different reasons why a website can be down. Our statistics mostly covered software and network issues with facts about the most common problems. With this in mind we found it interesting when we encountered a survey by Aperture Research Institute done back in April 2007 [...]
