It’s Hot in LA
Sorry for the almost 2 hours of downtime earlier today. Apparently a generator caught fire in the datacenter (the Garland building in LA) where (mt) servers live. Actually, it wasn’t just Media Temple. It seems as though DreamHost also runs its servers out of the same datacenter. A friend hosted at DreamHost told me that the building had a dead short and while everything was on generators, there was another dead short that lead to a generator fire. So pretty much 90% of the blogosphere was offline. Fortunately my site is back online and Media Temple actually personally called me to let me know what was up! They are going to be instituting a huge server move (I think that’s what he said) so none of this happens again.
In addition I think there will be some maintenance tonight to setup a new UPS system.


Ah so that is why Avalonstar is down.
i still don’t understand why shit stops working because it’s hot outside. i mean the datacenter has to have A/C so why would there be any problems?
This was not cool. I just got my home power back when my site’s and just about every good blog out there’s power died. It was the power outage all over again.
I don’t think it had anything to do with the heat outside.. I just thought that was a nice title. =)
Yeah, my Aunt Lori in Cali said it was so hot in Sacramento.
no friggin’ way. They always tout ultra reliability, but no datacenter can ever shake a stick at power failure up the ying yang like it has been lately around here. Wow.
Well, I don’t know about this specific instance but California sometimes receives rolling blackouts due to the amount of power consumption (read: air conditioning systems) during the hottest summer months. So it’s not entirely out of the question that the datacenter had to use their generators because the power was out on the main grid.
Most of my sites are on Dreamhost, so everything went down at once. Hooo-ray!
Worst thing is, we do a reality TV blog and Friday night was eviction night on UK Big Brother, so we couldn’t update and lost a few quid at the same time, dammit!
Funny that you post about it. After I couldn’t reach my site, I started looking around for other people’s sites who where on mediatemple. Low and behold, your site was down too. Then, I figured out it must have been something with Mediatemple. I am small fish, so I had to put in a support request to find out what was going on, but it is quite cool that they gave you a call.
DH and MT are in the same datacenter? Does MT donate their old, crappy hardware to DH? Is that how DH keeps their costs down?
Ha! the joys of being on a small server!
Really cool that they called you, Paul.
I am hosted in Atlanta at ASO.
That’s good to know kyle… O_o
Man I missed you in LA , Paul. Still, next time lunch is still on me.